



^ 















Harper's Stereotype Eaitton, 



LIFE AND TIMES 

OF 

HIS LATE MAJESTY 

GEORGE THE FOURTH. 



ANECDOTES OF DISTINGUISHED PERSONS OF THE 
LAST FIFTY YEARS. 



BY THE 

REV. GEORGE CROLY. 



NEW AND IMPROVED EDITION. 



N EW-YORK: 
PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, 

NO, 82 CLIFF-STREET. 



184 2. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 
The Brunswick Line * • . 9 

CHAPTER n. 
Birth of the Prince • 15 

CHAPTER HI. 

The Prince's Eeucation 22 

Public Schools. Cyril Jackson. 
Character of Swift. 

CHAPTER IV. 

The Prince's Establishment . 30 

Character of Lord North's Administration. 

Colonel de la Motte, the French Spy. 

Manners in England at the beginning of the French 

Revolution. 
European Discoveries in Science. 

CHAPTER V. 

The Prince's Embarrassments ....... 45 

Eloquence of Fox and Sheridan. 

CHAPTER VL 

The Prince's Friends 55 

Anecdotes of Pitt. 
The Pavilion. 

Sir Richard Hill and the Rolliad. 
Political Character of Fox. 
Literary Society of Frederic the Great. 
AS 



VI CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER VII. 

PASE 

The Prince's Friends 83 

Bons-mots of Hare, Fox, Sir John Doyle,Curran^ 

Sheridan, the Prince, &c. 
Character of Erskine. 
Bons-mots of Arthur O'Leiary. 
Rise of Bishop O'Beime. 

Flood, Grattan. Character of Irish Eloquence. 
Character of Sheridan's Wit and Eloquence. 
Story of Morgan Prussia. 
Burke as a Parliamentary Speaker. 
Colonel Fitzpatrick's Poetry. 
Junius and Sir Philip Francis. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

The Illness of George the Third . . . . . 134 
Mrs. Fitzherbert. 
Character of Lord Thurlow. 
Burke's celebrated Letter. 
Poem on the Irish Delegates. 

CHAPTER IX. 

The Prince's Marriage 168 

The Duke of Orleans. 

Death of the Duke of Lauzun. 

Dutchesses of Devonshire, Gordon, and Rutland. 

Ode to the Dutchess of Rutland. 

CHAPTER X. 

Ihe Royal Separation 191 

The Lennox Duel. 

Lady Jersey, Dr. Randolph, and the Princess' Letters. 

CHAPTER XI 

The French Revolution ...•.•,,, 305 

The Volunteers of England. 
The Prince's Offer of Service. 



CONTENTS. VU 



CHAPTER XII. 

PAGE 

Paeliament 222 

The Deaths of Burke, Pitt, and Fox. 

Lord Erskine's Character of Fox. 

The Abolition of the Slave-trade. 

The Slave-traders, France, Spain, and Portugal. 

CHAPTER XIII. 

The Whig Cabinet 237 

Lord Grenville's Auditorship of the Exchequer. 
Lord Ellenborough in the Cabinet. 
Lord Yarmouth's Negotiation M^ith Talleyrand. 
Canning's Satire on " All the Talents." 

CHAPTER XIV. 

The Spanish War 253 

The Berlin and Milan Decrees. 
Napoleon at Erfurt. 
Moore's Retreat to Corunna. 
Lords Stewart and Paget's Defeat of the French 
Guard. 

CHAPTER XV. 

The Regency . 269 

Character of George the Third. 
The Prince's Letter on the Regency. 
Assassination of Mr. Perceval. 

CHAPTER XVL 
The British Empire .......... 286 

CHAPTER XVIL 

Queen Caroline • 304 

Sir Walter Scott — The Coronation. 



VIU CONTENTS. 

. CHAPTER XVIII. 

PAGE 

Napoleon ... 318 

Waterloo. 
French Anecdotes. 

CHAPTER XIX. 

The Reign 337 

The Battle of Algiers. 
The Panic. 

Death of Lord Liverpool. 
Death of Mr^ Canning. 

CHAPTER XX. 

The Catholic Qitestion . , 346 

The WeUington Ministry. 
Speeches of Messrs. Peel, Dawson, &c. 
Protestant Defence of Idolatry. 
Death of Lloyd, Bishop of Oxford. 
Death of his Majesty. 



APPENDIX: 



Containing Anecdotes of George IV., his present Majesty 
Queen Adelaide, &c. &c. 



A MEMOIR 

OF 

THE LIFE 

OF 

GEORGE THE FOURTH. 



CHAPTER I. 

The Brunswick Line. 

The origin of the Brunswick Family is lost in the' 
fabulous ages of the north. The first occurrence 
of the name has been dimly traced by the German 
antiquaries to the invasion of the Roman empire 
under Attila, in the middle of the fifth century. 
Among the tribes which that almost universal chief- 
tain poured down upon Italy, the Scyrri (Hirri or 
Heruli) are found, whose king, Eddico, was sent as 
one of Attila's ambassadors to the court of Theodo- 
sius. The native country of the Scyrri was, like 
that of the principal invaders, in the north of Europe ; 
and they are supposed, on Pliny's authority, to have 
possessed the marshes of Swedish Pomerania, and 
some of the islands near the mouth of the Baltic. 

On the sudden death of Attila and the dismember- 
ment of his conquests, the Scyrri seized upon a large 
tract bordering on the Danube. But the possession 
was either too tempting or too carelessly held, to be 
relinquished without a struggle by the fierce chief- 
tains, who, in returning from Italy, had seen the fer- 
tility of Pomerania. The Scyrri were involved in 



1ft GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

a furious war, which seems to have spread from the 
Adriatic to the Euxine. The calamities of Rome 
were mercilessly revenged by the wounds inflicted 
in this mutual havoc of her conquerors ; and in one 
of those battles, in which extermination or victory 
was the only alternative, the tribe of the Pomera- 
nian Scyrri were totally cut off, with Eddico, their 
king-, ar their head, and Guelph, his son, or brother, 
whose name is then first heard in history. 

But the fortunes of the Scyrri were destined to be 
rapidly revived by one of the most singular and for- 
tunate conquerors of a time remarkable for striking" 
changes of fortune. A remnant of the tribe, unable 
or unwilling to follow their king in the Roman inva- 
sion, had, by remaining in Pomerania, escaped the 
general extinction. Odoacer, the son of the fallen 
king, put himself at their head, and marched from 
the Baltic to revenge the slaughter of his country- 
men. Like many of the northern chieftains, he had 
been educated, probably as a hostage, in the Roman 
camps, and had been familiar with the habits of the 
accomplished but profligate court of the Western 
Empire. His address and valour raised him to the 
command of the German troops in the service of the 
throne. Some slight which he received from Ores- 
tes, his former general, but now the father of the 
emperor ; or, more probably, his own lofty and daring 
ambition, stimulated him to the seizure of a diadem 
disgraced by the feebleness of its possessor. Sword 
in hand, he forced Augustulus to abdicate ; and, under 
the name of the Patrician, Odoacer a-scended the 
throne of the Cesars. 

Power won by the sword is naturally lost by the 
sword ; and Theodoric, the Goth, disputed the sove- 
reignty. After a succession of battles, in which the 
courage and military skill of Odoacer earned the 
praise of history, artifice circumvented the soldier ; 
he was assassinated at a banquet, within ten years 
of his triumph, his dynasty extinguished, and hia 



THE BRUNSWICK LINE. 11 

tribe, with his brother Guelph at their head, driven 
out once more to create a kingdom for themselves 
by their valour. But this expulsion was the true 
origin of that singular fortune by which the Guelphic 
blood has been the fount of sovereignty to the most 
renowned quarters of Europe. 

Guelph (variously called Anulphus, Wulfoade, and 
Onulf,) saw, with a soldier's eye, the advantage 
which a position in the Tyrolese hills gave to the 
possessor, for the purposes of invasion or defence. 
Expelling the Roman colonists, he established his 
kingdom in the mountains, formed alliances with the 
neighbouring tribes, and, looking down upon Ger- 
many on one side, and upon the loveliness and mag- 
nificence of Italy on the other, calmly prepared his 
people for future supremacy.* 

Without following the progress of this distin- 
guished line through the conflicts of the dark ages, 
and the restless revolutions of power in the Italian 
sovereignties ; we come to the authorized conclusion, 
that the house of Brunswick have held rank among 
the German princes for six hundred years. 

From George the First the ascent is clear up to the 
first Duke of Brunswick and Lunenburg, who re- 
ceived his investiture from the Emperor Frederick 
the Second in the middle of the 13th century. Still, 
this investiture was less an increase of honours than 
a shade on the ancient splendour of a family, whose 
dominions had once numbered Bavaria and Saxony, 
then of the size of kingdoms, and whose influence 
was felt from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. But 
the direct male line of the Brunswick princes is 
Italian. 

The marquises or sovereigns of Este, Liguria, and 
perhaps of Tuscany, were among its first branches. 
"In the eleventh century the primitive stem was 
divided into two. The elder migrated to the banks 

* Halliday's AiuiaJa Of the House of Hanover. 



12 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

of the Danube and the Elbe ; the younger more 
humbly adhered to the shores of the Adriatic. The 
dukes of Brunswick and the kings of Great Britain 
are the descendants of the first : the dukes of Fer- 
rara and Modena are the offspring of the second."* 

A singular compact in the sixteenth century added 
to the celebrity of the house of Brunswick Lunen- 
burg. William, the reigning duke, fourth son of 
Ernest, who had obtained for himself a title more 
illustrious than that of thrones, the Confessor, by 
his support of the great Protestant Confession of 
Augsburg ; had left fifteen children, seven of whom 
were sons. The young princes, on the death of their 
father in 1593, resolved, for the purpose of keeping 
up their house in undiminished dignity, that but one 
of them should marry: the marriage to be decided 
by lot, and the elder brother io have the undivided 
inheritance and be succeeded by the next surviver. 
The lot was drawn by the sixth brother, George, who 
married Ann Eleanora, daughter of the Landgrave 
of Hesse Darmstadt, by whom he had five children. 
The compact was solemnly kept by the brothers, and 
drew so much notice by its romantic fidelity, that the 
Sultan Achmet the First pronounced it "worth a 
man's while to take a journey through Europe to be 
an eye-witness of such wonderful brotherly affection 
and princely honour." 



The accession of George the Third to the throne 
of these realms was welcomed by the whole British 
empire. The difficulties which had thwarted the 
popularity of his two immediate predecessors were 
past ; the party of the exiled dynasty had been wasted 
away by time, or alienated by the proverbial selfish- 
ness and personal folly of the Stuarts ; a war was 
just closed, in which all the recollections of England 

* Gibbon's Posthumoua Works. 



THE BRUNSWICK LINE 13 

were of triumphs and territories won from the habit- 
ual disturber of Europe ; commerce was rising from 
the clouds always thrown round it by war, but rising 
with a strength and splendour unseen before, shoot- 
ing over the farthest regions of the world those 
beams which are at once light and life, brightening 
and developing regions scarcely known by name, 
and filling their bosom with the rich and vigorous 
fertility of European arts, comforts, and knowledge. 
All the acts of the young king strengthened the 
national good- will. His speech from the throne was 
deservedly applauded as the dictate of a manly and 
generous heart ; and this characteristic was made a 
wise topic of congratulation in the corresponding 
addresses of the people. " It is our peculiar happi- 
ness," said the London Address, "that your Majesty's 
heart is truly English ; and that you have discovered 
in your earliest years the warmest affection to the 
laws and constitution of these kingdoms." 
i An expression in the king's address to the privy 
council was seized with peculiar avidity as a proof 
alike of his head and heart. " I depend," said he, 
on the support of every honest man,^^ — a sentiment 
which united republican simplicity with kingly 
honour. He prohibited the court flattery then cus- 
tomary in the pulpit to the sovereign, reprimanding 
"Wilson, one of his chaplains, in the expressive words, 
— " That he came to church to hear the praises of 
God, and not his own." The independence of the 
judges was among his first objects ; and on the dis- 
solution of parliament he consummated the national 
homage, by forbidding all ministerial interference in 
the elections, and magnanimously declaring that 
*' He would be tried by his country." 
I The royal marriage now became a consideration 
of public importance. A bride was sought among 
the immediate connexions of the Royal Family, and 
the Princess Dowager proposed Sophia Charlotte, 
daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg Strelitz. 



14 GEORGE THE FOURTH* 

Lord Harcourt was made the bearer of the proposal, 
which was unhesitatingly accepted. The future 
queen arrived at St. James's on the 8th of Septem- 
ber, 1761. At nine on the same evening, with the 
formal rapidity of court marriages, she was wedded; 
and from that time, through half a century, became 
an object of interest and respect to the British na- 
tion. 

It was one of the striking features of the Hanover 
line, that it for the first time united the blood of the 
four races of kings, — the British, the Cambro-British, 
the Scottish, and the English ; deducing the succes- 
sion from Cadwaldr, last king of the Britons, through 
the seventeen princes of Wales, to Guledys Ddu, 
sister and heiress of Dafydd, married to Ralph Mor- 
timer, and thence through 

19. Roger, their son. 

20. Edmund Mortimer, his son. 

21. Roger, son of Edmund, first Earl of March. 

22. Edmond, son of Roger, married to Philippa, 
daughter and heiress of Lionel, Duke of Clarence^ 
third son of Edward the Third. 

23. Roger, their son. 

24. Anne, daughter and heiress of Roger, married 
to Richard of Conisburg, Earl of Cambridge. 

25. Richard, Duke of York, their son. 

26. Edward the Fourth, eldest son of Richard. 

27. Elizabeth, Edward's eldest sister, married to 
Henry the Seventh. 

28. Margaret, their eldest daughter, married to 
James the Fourth of Scotland. 

29. James the Fifth of Scotland, their son. 

30. Maryj Queen of Scots, daughter of James. 

31. James the First of England, son of Mary, by 
Lord Darnley. 

32. Elizabeth, daughter of James, married to Fre- 
derick, Elector Palatine. 

33. Sophia, their daughter, married to Ernest Au- 
gustus, Elector of Hanover. 



1762. J BIRTH OF THE pRiNCE. 15 

34. George the First, their son. 

35. George the Second, his son. 

36. Frederick, Prince of Wales, son of George the 
Second. 

37. George the Third, his son. 

38. George the Fourth, his son.* 



CHAPTER II. 
Birth of the Prince. 



On the 12th of August, the birth of the heir-ap- 
parent was announced; her Royal Highness the 
Princess Dowager of Wales, the ladies of her ma- 
jesty's bedchamber, and the chief lords of the privy 
council, being in attendance. 

On this occacion the king's popularity, indepen- 
dently of the great interests connected with the royal 
succession, had excited the most universal public 
feeling. As the time of the queen's accouchement 
drew nigh, the national anxiety increased. It was 
raised to its height by the intelligence, on the eve- 
ning of the 11th, that her majesty's illness was im- 
mediately at hand. The great officers of state were 
now ordered to await the summons in the neighbour- 
hood of the royal bedchamber ; a precaution which 
sounds strangely to our ears, but which has been 
considered a matter of propriety, from the imputa- 
tions thrown on the birth of the son of James the 
Second. 

* " Yorke's Royal Tribes." Those who desire to search deeper into 
the antiquities of the Hanoverian line, may examine " Eccard's Ori- 
gines Guelficse," " Muratori's Antichita Estense," for the Italian 
branch ; and Sir Andrew Halliday's " Annals of the House of Hano 
ver," for a detail of. the various possessions and alliances of the 
northern. 



16 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1762. 

The palace was crowded during the night. At 
four in the morning the Princess Dowager of Wales 
arrived. The queen had been taken slightly ill some 
time before. The great officers of state were in at- 
tendance in the anteroom of the royal chamber from 
five; and at twenty-four minutes past seven the joy- 
ful news was spread through the palace that an heir 
was born to the throne. The sound was caught with 
enthusiasm by the people, who had long since 
thronged the avenues of St. James's, was instantly 
conveyed through London, and was hailed by all as 
an event which accomplished the singular public 
prosperity of the new reign. 

On those occasions popular feeling delights in seiz- 
ing on every fortunate coincidence. The day was 
deemed auspicious, as the aimiversary of the Hano- 
ver succession. But a more direct popular triumph 
Occurred while the king was yet receiving the con- 
gratulations of the nobility. ' 

Of all wars, in those times, the most popular was 
a Spanish war ; and of all prizes, the most magnifi- 
cent was a Spanish galleon. The Hermione, one of 
those treasure-ships, sailing from Lima, had been 
taken in May, off Cape St. Vincent, by three English 
frigates. Rumour had exaggerated the wealth on 
board to the enormous sum of twelve millions ster- 
ling in silver, besides the usual precious merchandise 
from the Spanish settlements. But the actual trea- 
sure was immense ; the officers made fortunes, and 
even the share of a common sailor, though three 
crews were to divide the capture, was computed at 
nearly one thousand pounds. The chief cargo was 
silver, but many bags of gold were found hidden in 
the dollar chests, probably to evade some impost at 
Cadiz, which largely increased the value to the for- 
tunate captors. 

The wagons conveying the treasure had arrived 
in London on the night before, and were on this 
morning to have passed before the palace in their 



1762.] BIRTH OF THE PRINCE. 17 

way to the Tower. Almost at the moment of an- 
nouncing the royal birth, the cavalcade was seen en- 
tering- St. James's Street, escorted by cavalry and 
infantry with trumpets sounding, the enemy's flags 
waving over the wagons, and the whole surrounded 
by the multitude that such an event would naturally 
collect. The sudden spectacle (a striking and even 
tiiumphant one) led the king and the nobility to the 
palace windows. The news of th*^ prince's birth 
was now spread like flame ; and innumerable voices 
rose at once to wish the young heir prosperity. A 
Roman would have predicted, that an existence be- 
gun under such omens must close without a cloud. 
The king, in the flower of youth, and with the exulta- 
tion of a sovereign, and the still deeper delight of 
a father, was conspicuous in exhibiting his feeling 
of the public congratulation ; and the whole scene 
was long spoken of as one of the most natural and 
animated exhibitions of national joy known in the 
reign. 

George the Third had commenced his sovereignty 
with a manly and generous declaration of his pride 
in being born a Briton, — a declaration in which he 
had the more merit from its being his own, and from 
its being made in defiance of the cold-blooded states- 
manship which objected to it in the privy council, as 
a reflection on the Hanoverian birth of the two for- 
mer kings. The result showed the superior wisdom 
of a warm heart to a crafty head; for this single 
sentence superseded the popular memory of every 
other syllable in the royal speech, and became in- 
stantly the watchword of national affection to the 
throne. 

But the king followed the principle into the details 
of life. He loved to be a thorough Englishman. 
Like every man of sense, he scorned all affectation ; 
and, above all, scorned the affectation of foreign 
manners. The lisping effeminacy, the melancholy 
jargon, the French and German foppery of th« 

B2 



18 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1762. 

miistached and cigaired race that the coffee-house 
life of the continent has propagated among us, would 
have found no favour in the eyes of this honest and 
high-principled king. Honour to God and justice to 
man, public respect for religion and private guidance 
by its spirit, public decorum and personal virtue, a 
lofty and generous zeal for the dignity of his crown 
and people, and a vigilant yet affectionate discipline 
in his family and household, were the characteristics 
of George the Third. But even in his royalty he 
loved to revive the simple customs of English do- 
mestic life : and his famous speech from the throne 
scarcely gave more national delight and assurance 
of an English heart, than the homely announcement, 
which followed in a few days after the queen's re- 
covery ; that the royal infant was to be shown in its 
cradle to all who called at the palace ; and that their 
majesties, after the old English custom, invited the 
visiters to cake and caudle. 

On the 17th of August, a few days after his birth, 
his royal highness had been created Prince of Wales 
by patent, in addition to that weight of honours 
which devolves on the heir of the British and Hano- 
verian sovereignties. The title of Prince of Wales 
was one of the trophies of the conquest of Llewellyn, 
and was originally conferred by the first Edward upon 
his son in 1284, investing him by cap, coronet, verge, 
and ring. The title is exclusively devoted to the 
eldest son of the throne, except where it has been en- 
grossed by the throne itself. 

The eldest son is also, as inheriting from the Scot- 
tish kings, hereditary Steward of Scotland, Duke of 
Rothsay, Earl of Carrick, and Baron of Renfrew ; 
titles conferred by Robert the Third, king of Scot- 
iand, on the prince his eldest son, in 1399 ; and ap- 
propriated for ever to the princes of Scotland from 
their birth. 

The heir-apparent is bom Duke of Cornwall, and 
possessor of the revenues of the dutchy. But it is 



1762.] BIRTH OIF THE PRINCE. 19 

singular that he has no Irish title, while all the junior 
branches of the royal family enjoy honours from Ire- 
land. 

Addresses rapidly flowed in from the leading pub- 
lic bodies : that of the city seemed to have imbodied 
the substance of the chief popular testimonials. 
After congratulating his majesty on the birth, it al- 
luded to the Hanover succession. " So important 
an event, and upon a day ever sacred to liberty, fills 
us with the most grateful sentiments to the Divine 
Goodness, which has thus early crowned your ma- 
jesty's domestic happiness, and opened to your peo- 
ple the agreeable prospect of permanence and sta- 
bility to the blessings which they derive from the 
wisdom and steadiness of your majesty's victorious 
reign." This was courteous. But the addresses of 
the clergy were observed to be generally in a higher 
tone; and the address of the clergy of the province 
of Canterbury was distinguished by a direct appeal 
to those great, doctrines on which the constitution 
stands. The king's answer was manly, and suitable 
to the free king of a free people. " He saw with pe- 
culiar pleasure their gratitude to Heaven for the birth 
of a Protestant heir. Their confidence in his fixed 
intention to educate the prince in every principle of 
civil and religious liberty, was truly acceptable to 
him ; and he desired them to rely upon him for ob- 
serving his pledges to the empire, and for leaving no- 
thing undone that could promote the sacred interests 
of Christian piety and moral virtue, and transmit to 
posterity our most happy constitution." 

The fickleness of popularity is the oldest lesson 
of public life : yet the sudden change of public feel- 
ing towards George the Third is among its most re- 
markable and unaccountable examples. No Euro- 
pean throne had been ascended for the last hundred 
years by a sovereign more qualified by nature and 
circumstances to win " golden opinions" from his 
people. Youth, striking appearance, a fondness not 



20 GEORGE THE FOtJRTH. [1762. 

less for the gay and graceful amusements of court 
life than for those field sports which make the popu- 
lar indulgence of the English landholder, a strong 
sense of the national value of scientific and literary- 
pursuits, piety unquestionably sincere, and morals 
on which even satire never dared to throw a stain, 
were the claims of the king to the approbation of his 
people. In all those points also the contrast of the 
new reign with those of the two preceding monarchs 
was signally in its favour. 

Horace Walpole, a man rendered caustic by a sense 
of personal failure, and whose pen delighted to fling 
sarcasm on all times and men ; for once forgets his 
nature, and gives way to panegyric in speaking of 
the young king. " The new reign begins with great 
propriety and decency. There are great dignity and 
grace in the king's manner. I don't say this, like my 
dear Madame de Sevigne, because he was civil to me ; 
but the part is well acted. The young king has all 
the appearance of being amiable. There is great 
grace to temper much dignity, and a good nature 
which breaks out upon all occasions." 

The choice of Lord Bute as his prime minister 
tarnished all the king's qualities in the general eye. 
Insinuations that this handsome nobleman owed his 
rank at once to the passion of the princess dowager, 
and to arbitrary principles in the king, — insinuations 
never substantiated, and in their nature altogether 
improbable, — were enough to turn the spirit of that 
multitude who take their opinions from the loudest 
clamourer. Wilkes, a man broken in fortune, and 
still more broken in character, hopeless of returning 
to the ranks of honourable life, and both too noto- 
rious and too intemperate to be fit for any thing but 
faction, had been buoyed up into a bastard influence 
chiefly by the national jealousy of Scotland.* 

* " No petticoat government — no Scotch minister — and no Lord 
Seorge Sackville," were the watchwords of the time, placarded on the 



1762.] mmit OF THE pitmcE. 51 

But Lord Bute had soon ceased to be the ohject. 
A nobler quarry was found in the king. The " eagle 
towering in his pride of place, v/as by the mousing 
owl hawked at ;" and though not degraded in the 
opmion of men of honour and virtue, yet, with the 
multitude, his intentions were vilified, his personal 
qualities were turned into caricature, and his popu- 
larity was suddenly obscured, if not extinguished, 
by the arts of a demagogue, scandalous and criminal 
in every mode by which the individual can earn ex- 
clusion from society. 

Princes soon become public personages; and it 
cannot be denied that his royal highness displayed 
himself at a sufficiently early age ; for in 1765 he 
received a deputation from the Society of Ancient 
Britons, on St. David's day. The prince's answer 
to their address was certainly not long, for it was 
simply — " He thanked them for this mark of duty to 
the king, and wished prosperity to the charity." 
Though probably an earlier speech has been seldom 
made ; for the speaker was not quite three years old. 
But it was not lost on the courtiers. They declared 
it to have been delivered with the happiest grace of 
manner and action ; and that the features of future 
oratory were more than palpable : all which we are 
bound to believe. In December of the same year 
he was invested with the order of the garter, along 
with the Earl of Albemarle and the hereditary 
Prince of Brunswick. 



walls, and echoed by the mob : the three combining all the grievances 
of a party, afflicted by that most angry of all distempers— the desire 
^o get into place. 



22 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [177^. 



CHAPTER III. 

The Prince's Education. 

The prince had now reached a period when it be- 
came necessary to commence his education. Lord 
Holdernesse, a nobleman of considerable attain- 
ments, but chiefly recommended by his dignity of 
manner and knowledge of the court, was appointed 
governor : Dr. Markham and Cyril Jackson were 
the preceptor and sub-preceptor. 

Markham had attracted the royal notice by his 
celebrity as a schoolmaster. At the age of thirty he 
had soared to the height of professional glory ; for 
he was placed at the head of Westminster School, 
where he taught for fourteen years. The masters 
of the leading schools are generally cheered by some 
church dignity, and Markham received the deanery 
of Christ Church : from this he had been transferred to 
Chester ; and it was while he was in possession of 
the bishopric, that he was selected for the precep- 
torship of the Prince of Wales. 

But this private plan of education was .severely 
criticised. It was pronounced to be a secluded, soli- 
tary, and narrow scheme for court thraldom, fitter to 
make the future sovereign a bigot or a despot, than 
the generous and manly leader of a generous and 
manly people. 

The old controversy on the rival merits of public 
and private education was now revived ; and, to do 
the controversialists justice, with less of the spirit 
of rational inquiry than of fierce and prejudiced par- 
tisanship. 

The great schools were panegyrized, as breeding 



1771. J THE PRINCE'S EDUCATION. 23 

a noble equality among the sons of men of the va- 
rious ranks of society ; as inspiring those feelings of 
honour and independence, which in after-life make 
the man lift up his fearless front in the presence of 
his superiors in all but knowledge and virtue ; and 
as pre-eminently training the youth of the land to that 
personal resolution, mental resource, and intellec- 
tual dignity, which are essential to every honourable 
career; and are congenial, above all, to the free 
spirit and high-minded habits of England. 

All those advantages must be conceded, though 
burlesqued and tarnished by the fantastic and selfish 
tales of extraordinary facilities furnished to the man 
by the companions of the boy ; of the road to for- 
tune smoothed, the ladder of eminence miraculously 
placed in his grasp, the coronet, the mitre^, the high- 
est and most sparkling honours of statesmanship, 
held forth to the aspirant by the hand of early asso- 
ciation. — Hopes, in their conception mean, in their 
nature infinitely fallacious, and in their anticipation 
altogether opposed to the openness and manly self- 
respect, which it is the first duty of those schools to 
create in the young mind. Yet the moralist may 
well tremble at that contamination of morals which 
so often defies the vigilance of the tutor ; the man 
of limited income is entitled to reprobate the habits 
of extravagance engendered in the great schools; 
and the parent who values the affections of his chil- 
dren, may justly dread the reckless and unruly self- 
will, the young insolence, and the suUen and heart- 
less disdain of parental authority, which spring up at 
a distance from the paternal eye. But the question 
is decided by the fact, that without public education 
a large portion of the youth of England would re- 
ceive no education whatever; while some of the 
more influential would receive, in the feeble indul- 
gences of opulent parentage and the adulation of do- 
mestics, an education worse than none. The ad- 
vantages belong to the system, and to no other ; 



24 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1771. 

while the disadvantages are accidental, and require 
notliing for their remedy beyond increased activity 
in the governors, and a more vigorous vigilance in 
the nation. 

But of the education of a British prince there can 
be no question. It ought to be in its whole spirit 
pubhc. Under all circumstances, the heir to a throne 
will find flatterers ; but at Eton, or Westminster, the 
flattery must be at times signally qualified; and his 
noble nature will not be the less noble for the home 
truths which no homage can always restrain among 
the rapid passions and fearless tongues of boys. 
The chance of his falling into the snares of early 
favouritism is trivial. School fondnesses are easily 
forgotten. But, if adversity be the true teacher of 
princes, even the secure heir to the luxurious throne 
of England may not be the worse for that semblance 
of adversity which is to be found in the straight-for- 
ward speech, and bold, unhesitating competitorship 
of a great English school. 

Under Lord Holdemesse and the preceptors, the 
usual routine of classical teaching was carefully in- 
<3ulcated, for Markham and Jackson were practised 
masters of that routine ; and the prince often after- 
ward, with the gratitude peculiarly graceful in his 
rank, professed his remembrance of their services. 
But, though the classics might flourish in the princely 
establishm.ent, it soon became obvious that peace did 
not flourish along with them. Rumours of discon- 
tent, royal, princely, and preceptorial, rapidly es- 
caped from even the close confines of the palace ; 
and, at length, the public, less surprised than per^ 
plexed, heard the formal announcement, that the 
whole preceptorship of his royal highness had sent 
in their resignations. 

Those disturbances were the first and the inevita- 
ble results of the system. Lord Holdemesse ob- 
scurely complained that attempts were made to ob- 
tain an illegitimate influence over the prince's mind. 



1771.] THE prince's EDr cation. 25 

Public rumour was active, as at all times, in throw- 
ing light on what the courtly caution of the noble 
governor had covered Avith shade. The foreign poli- 
tics of the former reigns, the Scotch premier, and 
the German blood of the queen, were easy topics for 
the multitude ; and it was loudly asserted, that the 
great object of the intrigue was to supersede the 
prince's British principles by the despotic doctrines 
of Hanover. 

Similar charges had occurred in the early life of 
George the Third. That prince's governors were 
alternately accused of infecting his mind with arbi- 
trary principles, and with a contempt for the royal 
authority ; with excessive deference to the princess 
his mother, in opposition to the due respect for the 
sovereign; and with an humiliating subserviency to 
the will of the sovereign, in neglect of the natural affec- 
tion for his mother. Preceptors had been successively 
dismissed; committees of inquiry held upon their 
conduct; books of hazardous political tendency, — 
Father Orleans' Revolutions of the House of Stuart, 
Ramsay's Travels of Cyrus, Sir Robert Filmer's 
"Works, and Pere Perefixe's History of Henry the 
Fourth, — ^had beenreckoned amongthe prince's pecu- 
liar studies ; and the whole scene of confusion ended, 
as might be expected, in the greater misfortune of Lord 
Bute's appointment to the governorship — an appoint- 
ment which gave a form and colour to all the popular 
discontents, alarmed the public friends of the con- 
stitution, furnished an unfailing fount at which every 
national disturber might replenish his eloquence, and 
for many years enfeebled the attachment of the 
empire to a king whose first object was the good of 
liis people. 

A new establishment of tutors was now to be 
formed for the Prince of Wales. It bore striking 
evidence of haste ; for Lord Bruce, who was placed 
at its head, resigned within a few days. Some ridi- 
cule was thrown on this rapid secession, by the 

C 



26 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1771. 

Story that the young prince had thought proper to 
inquire into his lordship's attainments, and finding 
that the pupil knew more of classics than the master, 
had exhibited the very reverse of courtiership on 
the occasion. Lord Bruce was succeeded by the 
Duke of Montague ; with Hurd, Bishop of Litchfield, 
and the Reverend Mr. Arnald, as preceptor and sub- 
preceptor. 

The choice of the preceptors was harmless. Hurd 
was a man of feeble character, but of scholarship 
sufficient for the purpose. He contributed nothing 
to his profession but some " Sermons," long since 
past away ; and nothing to general literature but 
some " Letters on Chivalry," equally superseded by 
the larger research and manlier disquisition of our 
time. It had been his fortune to meet in early life 
with Warburton, and to be borne up into publicity by 
the strength of that singularly forcible, but unruly and 
paradoxical mind. But Hurd had neither inclination 
nor power for the region of the storms. When War- 
burton died, his wing drooped, and he rapidly sank 
into the literary tranquillity which, to a man of talents, 
is a dereliction of his public duty ; but to a man sti- 
mulated against his nature into fame, is policy, if not 
wisdom. 

Arnald was the prince's tutor in science. He had 
been senior wrangler at Cambridge, an honour which 
he had torn from Law, the friend of Paley, and 
brother of the late Lord EUenborough. It is a cu- 
rious instance of the impression that trifles wiU make, 
where they are not superseded by the vigorous and 
useful necessities of active life, to find the defeated 
student making a topic of his college overthrow to 
the last hour of his being. Not even Law's elevation 
to the opulent Irish bishopric of Elphin could make 
him forget or forgive the evil done at Cambridge to his 
budding celebrity. To the last he complained that the 
laurel had not fallen on the right head, that sorne unac- 
countable partiality had suddenly veiled the majestic 



1771. j THE prince's education. 27 

justice of Alma Mater, and that he must perish with- 
out adding the soUd glories of the wranglership to 
the airy enjoyments of the peerage and ten thousand 
pounds a-year. 

Lord North's spirit was peace, though plunged in 
perpetual quarrel at home and abroad, in the palace, 
in parliament, with the people, with the old world, 
and with the new. On this occasion he softened the 
irritation of the exiled governors and tutors by lavish 
preferment. The marquis of Carmarthen, married 
to Lord Holdernesse's daughter, obtained the appoint- 
ment, valuable to his habits, of Lord of the Bed- 
chamber ; Markham was made Archbishop of York ; 
and Cyril Jackson received the rich preferment of 
the deanery of Christ Church. Even Lord Brace's 
classical pangs were balmed by the earldom of Ayles- 
bury, an old object of his ambition. 

The name of Cyril Jackson still floats in that great 
limbo of dreams, college remembrance. He was 
Dean of Christ Church during twenty-six j^ears, and 
fulfilled the duties of his station, so far as superintend- 
ence was concerned. In this period he refused the 
Irish primacy — a refusal which was idly blazoned at 
the time as an act of more than Roman virtue. But 
heroic self-denial is rare among men ; and Jackson 
had obvious reasons for declining the distinction. 
His income was large, his labour light, and his time 
of life too far advanced to make change easy or dig- 
nified. 

Preferment in Ireland, too, is seldom a strong 
temptation to the opulent part of the English clergy. 
The remoteness from all their customary associations, 
and the perplexity of mingling among a new people, 
with new habits, and those not seldom hostile to the 
churchman, naturally repel the man of advanced life. 
The probability of being speedily forgotten by the 
great distributors of ecclesiastical patronage makes 
Irish preferment equally obnoxious to the younger 
aiergy who have any hopes at home. Swift's cor- 



28 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1771. 

respondence is a continual complaint of the misfor- 
tune of having the channel between him and the life 
he loved ; and his language has been echoed by almost 
every ecclesiastic v^^ho has suffered his English inte- 
rest to be expended in Irish promotion. 

If Swift at length abandoned his complaints, it was 
only for revenge. He cured his personal querulous- 
ness by turning it into national disaffection. Gifted 
with extraordinary powers of inflaming the popular 
mind, he resolved to show the British government 
the error which they had committed in sending him 
into what he to the last hour of his life called " his 
banishment." In the fierce recollections and national 
misery of Ireland, then covered with the unhealed 
wounds of the civil war, and furious with confisca- 
tions and party rage, Swift found the congenial 
armory for the full triumph of imbittered genius. 
His sense of ministerial insult was balmed by being 
expanded into hatred to the English name. Despair- 
ing of court favour, his daring and unprincipled spirit 
made occupation for itself in mob patriotism. Swift's 
was the true principle for a great demagogue. From 
the time of his first drawing the sword he showed 
no wavering, no inclination to sheath it, no faint- 
hearted tendency to make terms with the enemy. 
He shook off the dust of his feet against the gates 
of England, and once excluded, never deigned ,to 
approach them again, but to call down the fires of 
popular hatred upon their battlements. Even at this 
distance of time, and with the deepest condemnation 
of Swift's abuse of his talents, it is difficult to look 
upon him without the reluctant admiration given to 
singular ability, and inflexible and inexorable resolve, 
let the cause be what it may. ' For good or evil he 
stood completely between the government and the 
nation. The shadow of this insolent and daring 
dictator extinguished the light of every measure of 
British benevolence, or transmitted it to the people 
distorted, and in colours of tyranny and blood : and 



1771.] THE prince's education. 29 

unquestionably, if popular idolatry could repay a 
human heart for this perpetual paroxysm of revenge, 
no idol ever enjoyed a thicker cloud of popular 
incense. Swift was the virtual viceroy, in whose 
presence the English representative of the monarch 
dwindled down into a cipher. And this extraordinary 
superiority was not a mere passing caprice of for- 
tune. Among a people memorable for the giddiness 
of their public attachments, his popularity continued 
unshaken through life. To the last he enjoyed his 
criminal indulgence in thwarting the British govern- 
ment ; exulted in filling with his own gall the bosoms 
of the generous, yet rash and inflammable race, 
whom he alternately insulted and flattered, but whom, 
in the midst of his panegyrics, he scorned ; libelled 
the throne, while he bore the sentence of court exile 
as the keenest suffering of his nature ; solaced his 
last interval of reason by an epitaph, which was a 
libel on the human species ; and died, revenging his 
imaginary wrongs, by bequeathing to the people 
a fierce and still unexpired inheritance of hatred 
against the laws, the institutions, and the name of 
England. 

Jackson, in 1809, finding age coming heavy upon 
him, resigned his deanery at sixty-four, and then had 
the merit, which deserves to be acknowledged, of 
feeling that there is a time for all things, and that 
man should interpose some space between public life 
and the grave. Refusing a bishopric, offered to him 
by his former pupil, the Prince Regent, the old man 
wisely and decorously retired to prepare himself for 
the great change. He lived ten years longer, chiefly 
in the village of Felpham, in Sussex, amusing himself 
by occasional visits to his old friends in London, or 
to the prince at Brighton, by whom he was always 
received with scarcely less than filial respect ; and 
then returning to his obscure, but amiable and meri- 
torious life of study, charity, and prayer. He died 
of a brief illness in 1819. 

C2 



30 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [IT?? 

CHAPTER IV. 

The Prince's EstablishmenU 

The lavish distribution of patronage among the 
successive tutors and servants of the prince excited 
some angry remark, and much ridicule, at the time. 
But the minister rapidly overwhelmed this topic of 
public irritation by supplying the empire with injmies 
on a larger scale. North's propensity to govern by 
favours was the weakness of his nature ; and this 
weakness was soon urged into a diseased prodigality 
by the trials of his government. 

America had just taken the bold step of declaring 
her independence ;* France was almost openly pre- 
paring for war. • Every lurking bitterness of fancied 
wrong, or hopeless rivalry, throughout Europe, was 
starting into sudden life at the summons of America. 
The beacon burning on the American shores was re- 
flected across the Atlantic, and answered by a simi- 
lar blaze in every corner of the contment. Even 
at home, rebellion seemed to be rising, scarcely less 
in the measured hostility of the great English par- 
ties, than in the haughty defiance and splendid me- 
nace of Ireland, then half-phrensied with a sense of 
young vigour, and glittering in her first mail. 

Lord North was now at the head of the Treasury, 
and on him rested the whole weight of the British 
administration ; a burden too heavy for the powers 
of any one man, and in this instance less solicited 
by his own ambition than urged upon him by the 
royal command. The king, abandoned by the Duke 
of Grafton, insulted by Chatham, tyrannised over 
by the great party of the nobility, and harassed by 
the perpetual irritation of the people, had soon felt 
the severe tenure of authority ; and there were times 

* SeeNote I,— Page 412. 



1777.] THE prince's establishment. 31 

when, in mingled scorn and indignation, he was said 
to have thought of laying down the galling circle of 
an English crown, and retiring to Hanover. In this 
emergency his choice had fallen upon North, a man 
of rank, of parliamentary experience, and probably 
of the full measure of zeal for the public service, 
consistent with a personal career essentially of cau- 
tion, suspicion, and struggle ; — but of undoubted re- 
spect for his royal master, and loyal attachment to the 
throne. 

North had been all but born in the legislature, and 
all his efforts had been early directed to legislatorial 
distinction. " Here comes blubbering North," was 
the observation of some official person to George 
Grenville, as they saw the future premier in the 
Park, evidently in deep study. " I'll be hanged if 
he's not getting some harangue by heart for the 
House." He added, " that he was so dull a dog, 
that it could be nothing of his own." The latter re- 
mark, however, Grenville more sagaciously repelled, 
by giving tribute to North's parliamentary qualities, 
and saying, that, " If he laboured with his customary 
diligence, he might one day lead the councils of the 
country." But the injurious yet natural result of 
North's official education was, his conceiving that 
the empire must be prosperous so long as the minis- 
ter was secure, and that the grand secret of human 
government was a majority. 

At a distance of time, in which the clouds that 
then covered public affairs with utter mystery have 
melted away, we can discover that the minister, with 
all his intrepidity, would gladly have taken refuge 
under any protection from the storm that was already 
announcing itself, as if by thunder-claps, round the 
whole national horizon. But the com.petitors for his 
power were too certain of possession to suffer him 
to take shelter among them ; and his only alterna- 
tive was to resign his place, or make a desperate use 
of the prerogative. Whatever may be the virtue of 



32 George' THE poitrth. [1777 

later ministers, the temptation would have been irre- 
sistible by any administration of the last century ; 
and we can scarcely blame North, so much as hu- 
man nature in his day, if he embraced the evil oppor- 
tunity in all its plenitude. 

Ten peers at once were called up to the English 
house. But it was in Ireland, a country then as 
much famed for the rapid production of patriotism 
and its rapid conversion to official zeal, as now for 
the more tangible product of sheep and oxen ; where 
the perpetual defalcation of revenue was proudly 
overpaid by the perpetual surplusage of orators ready 
to defend the right at all hazards and all salaries, 
and rally round government to its last shilling, — it 
was in Ireland, where the remoteness of the Trea- 
sury table seems never to have dulled the appetite of 
the guests for the banquet, that the minister dazzled 
the eyes of opposition at home, by the display of his 
unchecked munificence. 

One day, the 2d of July, 1777, saw the Irish peer- 
age reinforced by eighteen new barons, seven barons 
further secured by being created viscounts, and five 
viscounts advanced to earldoms! Against the 
wielder of patronage like this, what party fidelity 
could stand ? There never had been such a brevet 
in Ireland : and every man suddenly discovered the 
unrighteousness of resistance to a minister so gifted 
with wisdom, and the privilege of dispensing favours. 
The fountain of honour had often before flowed co- 
piously in ministerial emergencies ; but now, as one 
of the Irish orators said on a similar occasion, in the 
curious pleasantry of his country, " It flowed forth 
as freely, spontaneously, and abundantly as Holy- 
well, in Wales, which turns so many mills." It fairly 
washed Irish opposition away. In England it 
softened even the more stubborn material of opposi- 
tion to an extraordinary degree of plasticity. In the 
midst of popular outcry, the increase of public ex- 
penses, and disastrous news from America, the ad- 
dress was carried by a majority of three to one. 



1781. J THE prince's establishment. 35 

But a more powerful and inflexible antagonist than 
political partisanship soon rose against this feeble 
system of expedients ; public misfortune was against 
the ministry. The American revolt had rapidly 
grown from a scorned insurrection into a recognised 
war ; Washington's triumphs over the ignorance of 
a succession of generals, who should never have been 
trusted out of sight of Hyde Park, legitimated rebel- 
lion; and popular indignation at unexpected defeat 
turned round and revenged itself on the premier. In 
this emergency, North undoubtedly exhibited pow- 
ers which surprised and often baffled his parliamen- 
tary assailants. If fancy and facetiousness could have 
sustained an administration, his might have tri- 
umphed, for no man ever tossed those light shafts 
with more pungent dexterity. But his hour was 
come. Every wind that blew from America brought 
with it evil tidings for the minister. Opposition, pa- 
ralyzed by its first defeats, now started up into sui- 
den boldness. Every new disaster of the cabinet re- 
cruited the ranks of its enemies. There was trea- 
chery too witliin the camp. Every man who had 
any thing to lose provided for the future by abandon- 
ing the falling cause. Every man who had any 
thing to gain established his claim by more open hos- 
tility. The king alone stood firm. At length, worn 
out by this perpetual assault, North solicited leave to 
resign, left his power to be fought for by the parties 
that instantly sprang out of opposition; and, after 
one more grasp at office, which showed only how 
ineradicable the love of power is in the human heart, 
retired — to make apologues on political oblivion, and, 
like a sage of Indian fable, tell children that the world 
was governed bv sugar-plums, and that the sugar- 

Elums were always forgotten when their distributor 
ad no more to give. 

On the first of January, 1781, the prince, though 
but Uttle more than eighteen, had been declared of 
age, on the old ground that the heir-apparent knows 

* See Note H.— Pog-e 412. 



34 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1781. 

no minority. A separate establishment, on a small 
scale, was assigned to him, and he was, for the first 
time, allowed to feel that the domestic discipline of 
Kew was about to be exchanged for the liberty suit- 
able to his age and station. The measure was be- 
ginning to form an angry topic; but it was acci- 
dentally extinguished by another which is given, as 
having attracted the whole curiosity of the time. 

This topic was the seizure of De la Motte, a French 
spy, of remarkable adroitness and some personal dis- 
tinction. De la Motte had been a colonel in the 
French regiment of Soubise, and behaved with gal- 
lantry on several occasions in the preceding war. 
On the peace, his regiment was reduced ; but a con- 
siderable estate falling to him, with the title of baron, 
he flourished for a while in Paris. Play, at length, 
broke down his resources ; and, at once to evade his 
creditors and to profit by the gaming propensities of 
this country, he fixed himself in London ; where, on 
the breaking out of the American war, he yielded to 
the temptation of acting as a private agent to the 
French ministry. An intercourse was soon esta- 
blished with a clerk in the navy department, through 
one Lutterloh, a German. This person figured as a 
country gentleman, of no slight importance. He took 
a villa at Wickham, near Portsmouth, to be on the 
spot for intelligence of the fleets : he lived showily, 
even kept a pack of hounds, and gave entertainments, 
by which he ingratiated liimself with the resident 
gentry and ofiicers, and was considered a prodigious 
acquisition to the hilarity and companionship of the 
country. De la Motte remained in London, attract- 
ing no attention, but busily employed in forwarding 
the information received from his confederate ; untO. 
full information of his treason reached government, 
a messenger was despatched for him, who found him 
tranquilly studying at his lodgings in Bond Street, 
and conveyed him to the secretary of state's ofiice, 
then in Cleveland Row. He was evidently taken by 



1781.] THE prince's establishment. 35 

surprise, for he had his principal papers about his 
person, and could find no better way to get rid of 
them than by dropping them on the stairs of the of- 
fice. They were of course immediately secured, and 
given to the secretary, Lord Hillsborough. His dili- 
gence as a spy was sufficiently proved by their value. 
They contained particular lists of all matters relating 
to the British dock-yards, the force and state of every 
ship, with their complements of men at the time of 
their sailing ; and his accuracy was urged so far as 
even to details of the number of seamen in the va- 
rious naval hospitals. 

An order was now issued for Lutterloh's appre- 
hension. He was found following the usual easy 
pursuits of his life, with his hunters and pack wait- 
ing for him, and his boots ready to be drawn on. 
The messengers prohibited his hunting for that day, 
and ordered him to deliver the keys of his desks, 
"where they found but money, cash and bills for 2001. ; 
but on looking more carefully at the bills, they per- 
ceived that they were aU drawn payable to the same 
person, and dated on the same day, with those of 
the baron. Lutterloh now felt that he was undone, 
and offered to make a general disclosure of the trea- 
son. His garden was dug up, and a packet of papers 
was produced in his handwriting, the counterparts 
of those already seized on De la Motte. He ac- 
knowledged his employnient by the French minis- 
try, at the rate of fifty guineas a month ; and pointed 
out the inferior agents. Ryder, the clerk, who had 
furnished the principal intelligence, was next arrest- 
ed : this was the blackest traitor of them all ; for he was 
in the receipt of a pension of 200/. a-year, a consi- 
derable sum at that period, for services rendered in 
sounding the enemy's coasts, and had been put into . 
an office in the navy at Plymouth, where he was 
employed by the Admiralty in contriving signals, 
which signals, it appears, he immediately com- 
municated to the enemy. The last link was detected 



36 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1781 

In the conveyancers of the intelligence across the 
channel, Rougier, a Frenchman, and his mistress, by 
whom the letters were despatched by way of Mar- 
gate and Ostend. 

Tliis affair derived a peculiar public interest from 
the rumour that high names were behind the cur- 
tain, which the attorney-general's speech was deemed 
to substantiate, by his dwelling strongly upon the 
" very great and dangerous lengths" to which De la 
Motte's money and connexions enabled him to go. 
The attorney and solicitor-generals were employed 
by government, and the celebrated Dunning was 
counsel for the prisoner. The confession of Lutter- 
loh certainly showed an extraordinary command of 
information. He had been first employed by De la 
Motte, in 1778, to furnish the French ministers with 
secret intelligence of matters relating to the navy. 
His first allowance for this was trivial, — but eight 
guineas a month. But his information had soon be- 
come so valuable, that his allowance was raised to 
fifty guineas a month, besides occasional presents of 
money. He had been in Paris, and held conferences 
with De Sartine, the French naval minister. There 
he had struck a bold bargain, not simply for the 
casual returns of ships and dock-yards, but for whole 
fleets, ojffering a plan for the capture of Commodore 
Johnson's squadron, on condition of his receiving 
eight thousand guineas, and a third of the value of 
the sliips for himself and his associates. But the 
bargain was thrown up by the economy of the 
Frenchman, who hesitated at giving more than an 
eighth of the ships ! Offended by this want of due 
liberality in his old employers, he sought out new, 
and had offered a plan to Sir Hugh Palliser for 
taking the French fleet. Dumiing's cross-examina- 
tion of this villain was carried on with an indignant 
causticity which was long reckoned among his finest 
efforts. He tore the approver's character in pieces, 
but he could not shake his evidence. At length. 



1783.] THE prince's establishment. 37 

Dunning himself gave way ; he became exhausted 
with disgust and disdain : broke away from the 
court, and was taken home overpowered and seri- 
ously ill. 

Lutterloh was one of those specimens of desperate 
principle, restless activity, and perpetual adventure, 
which might have figured in romance. He had tried 
almost every situation of life, from the lowest ; he 
had been in various trades, and roved between 
France, England, and America, wl^'3rever there was 
money to be made by cunning or personal hazard. 
From the book-keeper of a Portsmouth inn, he had 
started into a projector of war; had offered his 
agency to the revolted colonies ; and as their chief 
want, in the early period of the struggle, was arms, 
he had gone to America with a plan for purchasing 
the arms in the magazines of the minor German 
states. The plan was discountenanced by Congress, 
and he returned to Europe, to engage in the secret 
agency of France, through the medium of De la 
Motte. 

RadclifFe, a smuggler, who had a vessel constantly 
running to Boulogne, was the chief carrier of the 
correspondence. His pay was 20/. a trip. Rougier, 
the carrier to Radcliffe, received eight guineas a 
month. 

Yet it is a striking instance of the blind security 
in which the most crafty may be involved, and of 
the impossibility of relying on traitors, that De la 
Motte's whole correspondence had for a long time 
passed through the hands of the English secretary 
of state himself; the letters being handed by Rad- 
chffe to a government clerk, who transmitted them to 
Lord Hillsborough, by whom again, after having 
taken copies of them, they were forwarded to their 
original destination ; and, thus anticipated, had un- 
doubtedly the effect of seriously misleadmg the 
French ministry. De la Motte was executed. 

As the Prince was now to take his place in the 
D 



38 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1783. 

legislature, arrang-ements were commenced for sup- 
plying him with an income. The times were hostile 
to royal expenditure, and the king, for the double 
reason of avoiding any unnecessary increase to the 
public burdens, and of discouraging those propen- 
sities which he probably conjectured in the prince, 
demanded but 50,000/. a year, to be paid out of the 
civil list. The proposition was strongly debated in 
the cabinet, loag given down to scorn by the name of 
the Coalition CaMnet, and Fox insisted on making 
the grant 100,000L a year. But his majesty was 
firm, and the ministry were forced to be content with 
adding 40,000Z. and a complimentary message, to the 
60,000Z. for outfit proposed by the king. 

The Duke of Portland, on the 23d of June, brought 
down the following message to the lords. 

" G. R. His majesty, having taken into considera- 
tion the propriety of making an immediate and se- 
parate establishment for his dearly beloved son, the 
Prince of Wales, relies on the experience, zeal, and 
affection of the house of lords, for their concurrence 
in, and support ofj such measures as shall be most pro- 
per to assist his majesty in this design." 

The question was carried without a dissenting 
voice in the lords ; and the commons voted the sums 
of 50,000Z. for income, and 100,000/. for the outfit of 
the P rince's household. Now fully began his check- 
ered career. 

There are no faults that we discover with more 
proverbial rapidity than the faults of others; and 
none that generate a more vindictive spirit of virtue, 
and are softened down by fewer attempts at pallia- 
tion, than the faults of princes in the grave. Yet, 
without j ustice, history is but a more solemn libel ; and 
no justice can be done to the memory of any public 
personage without considering the peculiar circum- 
^ stances of his time. 

The close of the American war was the com- 
mencement of the most extraordinary period of 



1783.] THE prince's establishment. 39 

modern Europe : all England, all France, the whole 
continent, were in a state of the most powerful excite- 
ment : England, rejoicing at the cessation of hostili- 
ties, long unpopular and galling to the pride of a 
country accustomed to conquer; yet with the stain of 
transatlantic defeat splendidly effaced by her tri- 
umph at Gibraltar, and the proof given in that memo- 
rable siege of the unimpaired energies of her naval 
and military power, — France, vain of her fatal suc- 
cess, and exulting in the twofold triumph of wrest- 
ing America from England,* and raising up a new 
rival for the sovereignty of the seas, — the continental 
states, habitually obeying the impulses of the two 
great movers of the world, England and France, and 
feeling the return of life in the new activity of all 
interests, public, personal, and commercial. But a 
deeper and fearful influence was at work, invisibly, 
but resistlessly, inflaming this feverish vividness of 
the European mind. 

The story of the French Revolution is still to be 
told ; and the man by whom that tale of grandeur and 
atrocity is told, will bequeath the most appalling les- 
son ever given to the tardy wisdom of nations. 
But the first working of the principle of ruin in 
France was brilliant ; it spread a universal anima- 
tion through the frame of foreign society. All was 
a hectic flush of vivacity. Like the Sicilian land- 
scape, the gathering fires of the volcano were first 
felt in the singular luxuriance and fertility of the soil. 
Of all stimulants, political ambition lays the strong- 
est hold on the sensibilities of man. The revolu- 
tionary doctrines, still covered with the graceful 
robes of patriotism and philosophy, seemed to have 
led the whole population of France into enchanted 
ground. Every hour had its new accession of light ; 
every new step displayed its new wonder. Court 
formality — hereditary privilege — the solemnity of 
the altar — all that had hitherto stood an obstacle to 
ihe full indulgence of natural impulses, all the rigid 

* See Note m.—Pase 413. 



40 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1783. 

and stately barriers established by the wisdom of 
elder times against popular passion, were seen sud- 
denly to shrink and fade away before the approach 
of the new regeneration, like mists before the sun- 
beams. The listless life of the man of rank was sud- 
denly supplied with an excitement that kindled all 
the latent activities of his nature ; the man of study 
found, with delight, his solitary speculation assum- 
ing a life and substantial shape before his eye, and the 
long arrears of fortune about to be paid in public 
fame and power ; the lower classes listened with 
fierce avidity to the declaration, that thg time was at 
hand for enjoying their share of that opulent and 
glittering world on which they had hitherto gazed, 
with as little hope of reaching it as the firmament 
above their heads. 

Thus was prepared the Revolution. Thus was 
Jaid under the foundation of the throne a deadly 
compound of real and fantastic injury, of offended 
virtue and imbittered vice, of the honest zeal of ge- 
neral good, and the desperate determination to put all 
to hazard for individual license, rapine, and revenge, 
— a mighty deposite and magazine of explosion, long 
visible to the eyes of Europe, invisible to the French 
government alone, and which only waited the first 
touch of the incendiary to scatter the monarchy in 
fragments round the world. 

" Philosophy" was the grand leader in this pro- 
gress of crime ; and it is a striking coincidence, that 
at this period its title to national homage should have 
been, as if by an angry destiny, suffered to aid its popu- 
lar ambition, Europe never teemed with more illus- 
trious discoveries : the whole range of the sciences, 
from the simplest application of human ingenuity up 
to the most sublime trials of the intellect, found 
enthusiastic and successful votaries : the whole cir- 
cle was a circle of living flame. The French philo- 
sophers collected the contributions of all Europe, 
and| by imbodying them in one magnificent work, 



1783.] THE prince's establishment. 41 

claimed for themselves the peculiar guardianship and 
supremacy of human genius. Law, policy, and reli- 
gion had long possessed their codes: the French 
philosophers boasted that in the "Encyclopedic" 
they had first given the code of science. With all 
our hatred of the evil purposes of Diderot and 
D'Alembert, and all our present scorn of the delusions 
which their fierce malignity was devised to inflict 
npon mankind, it is impossible to look upon their 
labours without wonder. France had within a few 
years outstripped all competition in the higher 
branches of mathematical learning, a pursuit emi- 
nently fitted to the fine subtlety of the national ge- 
nius: but she now invaded the more stubborn pre- 
cincts of English and German research; seized upon 
chymistry and natural history ; and, by the success 
of Lavoisier and Buffbn, gave science a new and 
eloquent power of appeal to the reason and imagi- 
nation of man. 

A multitude of minor triumphs, in the various pro- 
vinces of invention, sustained the general glow of 
the scientific world ; but all were to be extinguished, 
or rather raised into new lustre, by three almost con- 
temporaneous discoveries, which to this hour excite 
astonishment, and which at some future time, decreed 
for the sudden advancement of the human mind to 
its full capacity of knowledge, may be among the 
noblest instruments of our mastery of nature. 
Those three were, Franklin's conductors, Montgol- 
fier's balloon, and Herschel's Georgium Sidus. Never 
was there an invention so completely adapted to 
inflame the most fantastic spirit of a fantastic people 
as the balloon. It absolutely crazed all France — • 
king, philosophers, and populace. The palpable 
powers of this fine machine, its beauty as an object, 
the theatrical nature of the spectacle presented at the 
ascents, the brilliant temerity of the aerial naviga- 
tors, soliciting the perils of an untried element, and 
rising to make the conquest of an unexplored region 

D2 



42 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1783. 

in a floating " argosie" of silk and gold, rich as the 
pavilions of a Persian king, filled the quick fancy of 
France with dreams. A march to the moon, or a 
settlement among the stars, was scarcely too high 
for the national hope. The secrets of the atmos- 
phere were only lingering for French discovery ; but 
the immediate propagation of the French name and 
power through the earth was regarded less as a pro- 
bable achievement than as an inevitable result of this 
most dazzling of all inventions.* 

Among the innumerable observations to which 
those discoveries gave rise, it was remarked that 
there was something of curious appropriateness in 
their respective countries. — That the young audacity 
of America claimed the seizure of the Hghtning ; a 
sentiment not forgotten in Franklin's motto : 

" Eripiiit ccelo flilmen, sceptrumque tyrannis." 

That the balloon was an emblem of the showy vola- 
tility and ambitious restlessness of France ; — ^while 
the discovery of a new planet, the revelation of a 
new throne of brightness and beauty in the firma- 
ment, was not unsuited to the solemn thought and 
religious dignity of the people of England. 

But to England was given the substantial triumph ; 
Cook's southern discoveries were made in this era ; 
and the nation justly hailed them, less as cheering 
proofs of British intelligence and enterprise, than as 
a great providential donative of empire — dominion 
over realms without limit, and nations without num- 
ber, — a new and superb portion of the universe, un- 
veiled by science, and given into the tutelar hand of 

* The topic superseded all others for the time. The answer of one 
.©f the city members to Lord Mansfield was a long-standing jest against 
the city. The earl, meeting him immediately on his return from France, 
asked, " Was the Anglomanie as prevalent as ever ?" The honest citi 
sen not recognising the word, and conceiving that France could furnish 
but onie theme, answered, " that Anglomanies were to be seen every day 
in some part of Paris, and that he had seen a prodigious one go up o» tha 
day he left it." 



1783.] THE prince's establishment. 43 

the British people, for the propagation of British arts 
"«,nd arms through the world, and for an eternal repo- 
pitory of our laws, our literature, and our religion. 

The peace of 1782 threw open the continent ; and 
it was scarcely proclaimed, when France was 
crowded with the English nobility. Versailles \v:is 
the centre of all that was sumptuous in Europe. 
The graces of the young queen, then in the pride of 
youth and beauty ; the pomp of the royal 'family and 
the noblesse ; and the costliness of the fetes and 
celebrations, for which France has been always fa- 
mous, rendered the court the dictator of manners, 
morals, and politics, to all the higher ranks of the 
civilized world. But the Revolution was now has- 
tening with the strides of a giant upon France ; the 
torch was already waving over the chambers of this 
morbid and guilty luxury. The corrective was ter- 
rible : history has no more stinging retrospect than the 
contrast of that brilliant time with the days of shame ^ 
and agony that followed — the untimely fate of beauty," 
birth, and heroism, — the more than serpent-brood 
that started up in the path which France once 
emulously covered with flowers for the step of her 
rulers, — the hideous suspense of the dungeon, — the 
heart-broken farewell to life and royalty upon the 
scaffold. But France was the grand corrupter ; and 
its supremacy must in a few years have spread incu- 
rable disease through the moral frame of Europe. 

The Englishmen of rank brought back with them 
its dissipation and its infidelity. The immediate cir- 
cle of the English court was clear. The grave vir- 
tue of the king held the courtiers in awe : and the 
queen, with a pious wisdom for which her name 
should long be held in honour, indignantly repulsed 
every attempt of female levity to approach her pre- 
sence. But beyond this sacred circle the influence 
of foreign association was felt through every class 
of society. The great body of the writers of Eng- 
land, the men of whom the indiscretions of the 



44 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1783.' 

higher ranks stand most in awe, had become less the 
guardians than the seducers of the public mind. 
The " Encyclopedic," the code of rebellion and irre- 
ligion stiU more than of science, had enlisted the 
majority in open scorn of all that the heart should 
practise or the head revere ; and the Parisian athe- 
ists scarcely exceeded the truth, when they boasted 
of erecting a temple that was to be frequented by 
worshippers of every tongue. A cosmopolite infidel 
republic of letters was already lifting its front above 
the old sovereignties, gathering under its banners a 
race of mankind new to public struggle, — the whole 
secluded, yet jealous and vexed race of labourers in 
the intellectual field, — and summoning them to devote 
their most unexhausted vigour and masculine ambi- 
tion to the service of a sovereign, at whose right and 
left, like the urns of Homer's Jove, stood the golden 
founts of glory. London was becoming Paris in all 
but the name. There never was a period when the 
tone of our society was more polished, more ani- 
mated, or more corrupt. Gaming, horse-racing, and 
still deeper deviations from the right rule of life, 
were looked upon as the natural embellishments of 
rank and fortune. Private theatricals, one of the 
most dexterous and assured expedients to extinguish, 
first the delicacy of woman, and then her virtue, were 
the favourite indulgence ; and, by an outrage to Eng- 
lish decorum, which completed the likeness to 
France, women were beginning to mingle in public 
life, try their influence in party, and entangle their 
feebleness in the absurdities and abominations' of 
political intrigue. In the midst of this luxurious pe- 
riod the Prince of Wales commenced his public ca- 
reer. His rank alone would have secured him flat- 
terers ; but he had higher titles to homage. He wjis 
then one of the handsomest men in Europe ; his 
countenance open and manly; his figure tall, and 
strikingly proportioned ; his address remarkable for 
easy elegance, and his whole air smgulaily noble. 



1787.] THE prince's embarrassments. 45 

His contemporaries still describe him as the model 
of a man of fashion, and amusingly lament over the 
degeneracy of an age which no longer produces such 
men. 

But he possessed qualities which might have atoned 
for a less attractive exterior. He spoke the principal 
modern languages with sufficient skill ; he was a 
tasteful musician ; his acquaintance with English 
literature was, in early life, unusually accurate and 
ext'ensive ; Markham's discipline, and Jackson's 
scholarship, had given him a large portion of classi- 
cal knowledge ; and nature had given him the more 
important public talent of speaking with fluency, 
dignity, and vigour. 

Admiration was the right of such qualities, and 
we can feel no surprise if it were lavishly offered by 
both sexes. But it has been strongly asserted, that 
the temptations of flattery and pleasure were thrown 
ir his way for other objects than those of the hour; 
that his wanderings were watched by the eyes of 
politicians ; and that every step which plunged him 
deeper into pecuniary embarrassment was triumphed 
in, as separating him more widely from his natural 
connexions, and compelling him in his helplessness 
to throw himself into the arms of factions alike hostile 
to his character and his throne. 



CHAPTER V. 

7%c Princess Frniharrassments. 

In 1787, the state of the prince's income began ta 
excite the anxious attention of parliament and the 
country. The allowance given three years before 
tad been found totally inadequate to his expenditure, 



46 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

t 

and there was at length no resource but to apply to 
the nation. 

On the original proposal of 50,000Z. a-year, the 
" prince's friends," for he had already found political 
protectors, had strenuously protested against the 
narrowness of the sum. But the prince decorously 
reprehended their zeal, and declared his readiness 
to submit entirely to the will of his father, and his 
extreme reluctance to be the cause of any misunder- 
standing between the king and his ministers. 

Yet a short experience showed that the income 
was altogether inadequate to the expenses of Carl- 
ton House. The prince was now upwards of 150,000Z. 
in debt. His creditors, perhaps in some degree 
alarmed by the notorious alienation of the court, 
had begun suddenly to press for payment. The 
topic became painfully public ; the king was applied 
to, and by his command k full statement was laid be- 
fore him. But the result was a direct refusal to 
interfere, formally conveyed through the ministers. 

Family quarrels are proverbial for exhibiting errors 
on both sides ; and even the quarrel on this occasion, 
high as the personages were, made no exception to 
the rule. The prince was treated sternly ; in return, 
the prince acted rashly. The royal indignation might 
have been justly softened by recollecting the inex- 
perience, the almost inevitable associates, and the 
strong temptations of the heir-apparent ; and the 
measure ought to have been made an act of favour, 
which was so soon discovered to be an act of neces- 
sity. On the other hand, the prince, impetuously, 
on the day after the royal answer, broke up" his 
household, dismissed his officers in attendance, or- 
dered his horses to be sold, shut up every apartment 
of his palace not required for immediate personal 
accommodation, and commenced living the life of a 
hermit, which he called that of a private gentleman; 
his political friends, that of an ancient sage ; and the 
court, that of a young rebel. The decided impres- 



1787.] THE PRINCE'S EMBARRASSMENTS. 47 

sion on the king's mind was, that this sudden resolu- 
tion was suggested by individuals whose first object 
was to enlist the sympathies of the nation against 
the minister, and who also had no reluctance to see 
the king involved in the disgrace of his cabinet. A 
remarkable incident at this period made the aliena- 
tion palpable to the empire. Margaret Nicholson's 
attempt to assassinate the king,* an attempt which 
failed only from the accidental bending of the knife, 
had been immediately communicated to all the au- 
thorities, and the principal persons connected with 
the royal family, with but one exception. To the 
prince no communication was made. He heard it at 
Brighton, and hastened to Windsor, where he was re- 
ceived by the queen alone. The king was inacces- 
sible. 

But the system of seclusion was too little adapted 
to the g^eat party Avho had now totally engrossed 
the direction of the prince ; and too repulsive to the 
natural habits of rank and birth, to last long. The 
windows of Carlton House were gradually opened, 
and the deserted halls gave their pomps to the light 
once more. His advisers prompted him to strengthen 
his public influence by private hospitality; and, from 
all the records of those years, we must believe that 
no host possessed more abundantly the charm of 
giving additional zest to the luxuries of the banquet. 
He now began to give frequent entertainments ; from 
personal pleasure, the feeling grew into political in- 
terest ; and it was at length resolved, that the prince 
owed it to his own character to show that he was 
not afraid of public investigation. 

The opening of the budgetf was considered a 
proper time, and the subject was confided to the hands 
of Alderman Newnham, no orator, but a man of mer- 
cantile wealth and personal respectability. This 
advocate contented himself, in the first instance, 

* August 2, 1786. t April 20, 1787. 



48 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

with a brief panegyric on the prince's efforts to meet 
his difficulties ; and a demand whether ministers in- 
tended to bring forward any proposition for retriev- 
ing his affairs. 

Concluding with the words, that "though the 
conduct of that illustrious individual under his diffi- 
culties reflected the highest honour on his charac- 
ter, yet nothing could be surer to bring indelible 
disgrace upon the nation, than suffering him to re- 
main any longer in his present embarrassed circum- 
stances." 

Pitt's reply was short but peremptory. " It was 
not his duty to bring forward a subject of the nature 
that had been mentioned, without his majesty's com- 
mands. It was not necessar)^ therefore, that he 
should say more, than that on the present occa- 
sion he had not been honoured with any such com- 
mand." 

The campaign was now fairly begun, and opposi- 
tion determined to crush the minister. Private meet- 
ings were held, friends were summoned, and the 
strength of parties was about to be tried in a shock 
which, in its results, might have shattered the con- 
stitution. Pitt's sagacity saw the coming storm, and 
he faced it with the boldness that formed a promi- 
nent quality of his great character. He sternly de- 
nounced the subject, as one not merely delicate but 
dangerous ; he warned the mover of this hazardous 
matter of the evils which rashness must produce ; 
and concluded a short but powerful address, by threat- 
ening to call for " disclosures which must plunge the 
nation into the most formidable perplexity." While 
the house were listening with keen anxiety to this 
lofty menace, and expecting on what head the light- 
nings were to be launched, Pitt renewed the charge, 
by turning full on the opposition bench, and declar- 
ing, that if the " honourable member should persist 
in his determination to bring his motion forward 
again> his majesty's government would be compelled 



1787.] THE prince's embarrassments. 49 

to take the steps which they should adopt ; and that, 
for his own part, however distressing it might be to 
his personal feelings, from his profound respect for 
the royal family, he had a public duty to discharge 
which he would discharge, freely, fairly, and uncon- 
ditionally." 

A succession of debates followed, in which the 
whole vigour of party, and no slight portion of its 
•virulence, were displayed. RoUe, the member for 
Devonshire, with a superabundant zeal, which ex- 
posed him naked to all the fiery wrath of Sheridan 
and Fox, and lifted him up as a general mark for 
the shafts of opposition wit, had imbodied Pitt's 
mysterious charge into " matters by which church 
and state might be seriously affected," — an allusion 
understood to refer \o the rumoured marriage of the 
prince with Mrs. Fitzherbert. 

Sheridai), with contemptuous pleasantry, denied 
the truth of the report, which, he said, " the slight 
share of understanding that nature had vouchsafed 
to ixlm, was altogether unable to comprehend ; though, 
to be sure, something of his ignorance might be ac- 
counted for by his not being peculiarly fond of put- 
ting himself in the established school for this kind of 
learning. Among all the shows to which curiosity 
had led him in the metropolis, he had unfortunately 
omitted the whispering gallery in the neighbourhood 
of Whitehall. He was also confident that there was 
a great deal of recondite knowledge to be picked up 
by any diligent student who had taken his degree on 
the back-stairs, and he duly commended the pro- 
gress the honourable gentleman had made in those 
profitable studies. For his own part, Heaven help 
him ! he had always found the treasury passages at 
best, cold, dark, and cheerless ; he believed the con- 
science as weU as the body might have a rheumatic 
touch ; and he acknowledged that he was never the 
better for the experiment. But where he had heard only 
the ominous cries and wailings of the wind ; the ears 

E 



50 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787 

of Others, more happily disposed, might be more fortu- 
nate ; where he heard only the rage of Auster and 
Eurus, to others Auster might come ' the zephyr 
perfumed from my lady's bedchamber ;' and Eurus 
be the 

— ^'purpureo spirans ab ortu, eois, Eurus equis.' 

There the honourable gentleman and his friends 
might be regaled with those snatches and silver 
touches of melody, which < hey shaped and expanded 
into harmonies on so grand and swelling a scale, for 
the admiration of the house and the country." 

The house laughed, but Rolle's remarks had made 
an impression ; and Fox, who had been unaccounta- 
bly absent from the debates, was compelled to ap- 
pear : he now became the challenger in turn. — " He 
stood there prepared to substantiate every denial that 
had been made by his honourable friend (Sheridan). 
He demanded investigation. He defied the sharpest 
scrutiny, however envenomed by personal feelings, 
to detect in the conduct of the prince, as a gentle- 
man, or as the hope of an illustrious line, any one 
act derogatory to his character. He came armed 
with the immediate authority of his royal highness 
to assure the house, that there was no part of his 
conduct which he was either afraid or unwilling to 
have investigated in the most minute manner." 
x,^ This bold defiance, delivered with the haughtiest 
tone and gesture, raised a tumult of applause ; which 
was interrupted only by his suddenly fixing his eyes 
full on the minister ; and, as if he disdained to pour 
his vengeance on minor culprits, heaping the whole 
reprobation upon him, whom he intimated to be the 
origin of the calumny. 

" As to the allusions," said he, scornfully, " of the 
honourable member for Devon, of danger and so 
forth to church and state, I am not bound to under- 
stand them until he shall make them intelligible; but 



1787.] THE prince's embarrassments. 51 

I suppose they are meant in reference to that false- 
hood which has been so sedulously propagated out of 
doors for the wanton sport of the vulgar, and which 
I now pronounce, by whomsoever invented^ to be a 
miserable calumny, a low, malicious falsehood." — 
He had hoped, that in that house a tale, only fit to 
impose upon the lowest persons in the streets, would 
not have gained credit; but, when it appeared that 
an invention so monstrous, a report of what had not 
the smallest degree of foundation, had been circuited 
with so much industry as to make an impression on 
the mind of members of that house, it proved the 
extraordinary efforts made by the enemies of his royal 
highness to propagate the grossest and most malig- 
nant falsehoods, with a view to depreciate his charac- 
ter, and injure him in the opinion of the country. 
He was at a loss to imagine what species of party 
could have fabricated so base a calumny. Had there 
existed in the kingdom such a faction as an anti- 
Brunswick faction, to it he should have certainly im- 
puted the invention of so malicious a falsehood ; for 
he knew not what other description of men could 
hdiVe felt an interest in first forming and then circulat- 
ing, with more than orc?*nary assiduity, a tale in every 
particular so unfounded. His royal highness had au- 
thorized him to declare, that as a peer of parliament 
he was ready, in the other house, to submit to any 
the most pointed questions ; or to afford his majesty, 
or his majesty's ministers, the fullest assurances of 
the utter falsehood of the statement in question, 
which never had, and which common sense must see 
never could have, happened. 

After this philippic, to which Pitt listened with the 
utmost composure, but which produced an extraor- 
dinary interest in the house. Fox adverted to the 
original purpose of the application : " Painful and de- 
licate the subject undoubtedly was; but however 
painful it might be, the consequences were attributa- 
Dle solely to those who had it in their power to 



62 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

supersede the necessity of the princess coming to 
parliament, to relieve him from a situation embar- 
rassing to himself and disgraceful to the country." 

This speech may be taken as a specimen of Fox's 
vituperative style, — the reiterated phrases of scorn, 
the daring defiance, and the reckless weight of con- 
tempt and condemnation, which he habitually flung 
upon his adversary. But the full effect can be con- 
ceived only by those who have heard this great 
speaker. His violent action, confused voice, and un- 
gainly form were forgotten, or rather, by one of the 
wonders of eloquence, became portions of his power. 
A strong sincerity seemed to hurry him along : his 
words, always emphatic, seemed to be forced from 
him by the fulness and energy of his feelings ; and 
in the torrent he swept away the adversary. 

This speech decided the question. Rolle still per- 
sisted in his alarms, and still brought down upon him- 
self the declamation of Sheridan and the retorts of 
Fox, who bitterly told him, that " though what he 
had said before was, he thought, suiRcient to satisfy 
every candid mind, he was willing still to restate 
and re-explain, and, if possible, satisfy the most per- 
■zjerse." 

The member for Devon at last declared that he 
had spoken only from his affection for the prince ; 
that "he had not said, he was dissatisfied," and 
that he now left the whole matter to the judgment 
of the house. Pitt covered his friend's retreat, 
by a defence of the privileges of speech in the legis- 
lature. 

But such contests were too hazardous to be wisely 
provoked again. Misfortune, which in private life 
has a singular faculty of stripping the sufferer of his 
friends, in public life often gathers the national sym- 
pathy round him. The man who would have been 
left to perish in his cell, brought to the scaffold, is 
followed by the outciy of the multitude. The gene- 
ral voice began to rise against the severity of go- 



1787.] THE PRINCE'S EMBARRASSMENTS. 53 

vernment. ; and in a few days after the debate,* the 
prince was informed by the minister, that if the mo- 
tion intended for the next day were withdrawn, every 
thing should be settled to his satisfaction. Accor- 
dingly, Alderman Newnham commimicated to the 
house, in which four hundred members were present, 
the intelligence that his motion was now rendered 
unnecessary ; and all was mutual congratulation. 

The ministerial promise was kept ; but kept with 
a full reserve of the royal displeasure. A stem re- 
buke was couched in a message to parliament. 

" G. R. It is with the greatest concern his majesty 
acquaints the house of commons, that from the ac- 
counts which have been laid before his majesty by 
the Prince of Wales, it appears that the prince has 
incurred a debt to a large amount, which, if left to be 
discharged out of his annual income, would render it 
impossible for him to support an establishment suited 
to his rank and station. 

" Painful as it is at all times to his majesty to pro- 
pose an addition to the many expenses necessarily 
borne by his people, his majesty is induced, from his 
paternal affection to the Prince of Wales, to recur to 
the liberality and attachment of his faithful commons 
for their assistance on an occasion so interesting to 
his majesty's feelings, and to the ease and honour of 
so distinguished a branch of his royal family. 

" His majesty could not, however, expect or desire 
the assistance of this house, but on a well-grounded 
expectation that the prince will avoid contracting any 
debts in future, . 

" With a view to this object, and from an anxious 
desire to remove any possible doubt of the sufficiency 
of the prince's income to support amply the dignity 
of his situation, his majesty has directed the sum of 
10,000Z. per annum to be paid out of the civil list, in 
addition to the allowance which his majesty has 

* May 3. 
E2 



54 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

hitherto given him ; and his majesty has the satis- 
faction to inform the house, that the Prince of Wales 
has given his majesty the fullest assurances of his 
determination to confine his future expenses within 
the income, and has also settled a plan for arranging 
those expenses in the several departments, and for 
fixing an order for payment, under such regulations 
as his majesty trusts will effectually secure the due 
execution of the prince's intentions. 

" His majesty will direct an estimate to be laid 
before this house of the sum wanting to complete^ 
in a proper manner, the work which has been under- 
taken at Carlton House, as soon as the same can be 
prepared with sufficient accuracy, and recommends 
it to his faithful commons to consider of making 
some provision for this purpose/' 

This account was shortly after laid on the table. 

Debts. 

Bonds and debts 13,000Z. 

Purchase of houses 4,000 

Expenses of Carlton House 53,000 

Tradesmen's bills 90,804 

160,804?. 

Expenditure from July, 1783, to July, 1786. 

Household, &c 29,276Z. 

Privy purse 16,050 

Payments made by Col. Hotham, particulars 

delivered in to his majesty 37,203 

Other extraordinaries 11,406 

93,936i 

Salaries 64,734 

Stables 37,919 

Mr. Robinson's 7,059 

193,648.'. 

On the day following the presentation of this pa- 
per, the commons carried up an address to the throne, 
humbly desiring that his majesty would order 
161,000/. to be issued out of the civil list for the 
payment of the debt, and a sum of 20,000/. for the 
completion of Carlton House. 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 55 

This proceeding had the usual fate of half mea- 
sures, it palliated the evil only to make it return in 
double force. It showed the king's displeasure, 
without ensuring the prince's retrenchment. The 
public clamoured at the necessity for giving away so 
large a sum of the national money ; while the cre- 
ditors, whom the sum, large as it was, would but in- 
adequately pay, boldly pronounced themselves de- 
frauded. Whether the leaders of the legislature 
were rejoiced or discontented, remained in their own 
bosoms. But Pitt had accomplished the important 
purpose of suppressing for the time a topic which 
might have deeply involved his administration ; and 
Fox's sagacity must have seen in this imperfect 
measure the very foundation on which a popular 
leader would love to erect a grievance. It gave him 
the full use of the prince's injuries for all the pur- 
poses of opposition. Hopeless of future appeal, 
stung by public rebuke, and committed before the 
empire in hostility to the court and the minister, the 
prince was now thrown completely into his hands. 



CHAPTER VI. 

The Prince's Friends, 

There seems to be a law of politics, by which the 
heir of the crown is inevitably opposed to the crown. 
This grew into a proverb in Holland, when the stadt- 
holderate had become hereditary; and may have 
found its examples in all countries where the consti- 
tution retains a vestige of freedom. The line of the 
Georges has furnished them for three generations. 
Frederic, Prince of Wales, son of George the Se- 
cond, was in constant opposition to the court, wag 
the centre of a powerful party, and was even in- 



56 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

volved in personal dispute with the king-. There is 
a curious similitude in his life to that of his late ma- 
jesty. — The origin of the alienation was, the old 
" root of all evil," money. The opposition headed 
by Pulteney (the Fox of his day) adopted the 
prince's cause, and moved in parliament for the in- 
crease of his income to 100,000/. The king resented 
equally the demand and the connexion ; and the dis- 
pute was carried on with the natural implacability of 
a family quarrel. — The prince collected the wits 
round him ; the king closeted himself with a few an- 
tiquated and formal nobles. — The prince's residence, 
at Cliefden, in Buckinghamshire, was enlivened by 
perpetual festivity, baUs, banquets, and plays ; among 
which was the mask of Alfred, by Thompson and 
Mallet, written in honour of the Hanover accession, 
with Quin in the part of Alfred. St. James's was a 
royal fortress, in which the king sat guarded from 
the approach of all public gayety. — Frederic, too, 
pushed the minister so closely, that he had no refuge 
but in a reconciliation between the illustrious belli- 
gerants ; and Walpoie, perplexed by perpetual de- 
bate, and feeling the ground giving way under him, 
proposed to the prince an addition of 50,000/. to his 
income, and 200,000/. for the discharge of his debts. 
But Walpole's hour was come ; opposition, con- 
scious of his weakness, determined to give him no 
respite. The prince haughtily refused any accom- 
modation while the obnoxious minister was suffered 
to remain in power. Walpoie was crushed. The 
prince led opposition into the royal presence ; and 
the spoils of office rewarded them for a struggle 
■carried on in utter scorn alike of the king's feelings 
and the national interests, but distinguished by great 
talent, dexterity, and determination. Yet victory 
was fatal to them; they quarrelled for the spoils, 
and Walpoie had his revenge in the disgrace of Pul- 
teney for ever. 
On the death of Prince Frederic, the next heia 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 57 

Prince George, became the prize of opposition 
headed by Pitt (Lord Chatham), Lord Temple, and 
the Grenvilles. Leicester House, the residence 
of his mother, again eclipsed St. James's, and the 
Newcastle administration trembled at the popularity 
of this rival court. To withdraw his heir from party, 
the king offered him a residence in St. James's. 
But before the hostility could be matured into open 
resistance, a stroke of apoplexy put an end to the 
royal life, placed the prince on the throne, and 
turned the eloquence of opposition into sarcasms 
on Scotch influence, and burlesques on the princess- 
mother's presumed passion for the handsome minister. 

In other lands the king is a despot, and the heir- 
apparent a rebel ; in England the relation is softened, 
and the king is a tory, and the heir-apparent a whig. 
Without uncovering the grave, to bring up things for 
dispute which have lain till their shape and substance 
are half dissolved away in that great receptacle of 
the follies and arts of mankind, it is obvious that 
there was enough in the contrast of men and parties 
to have allured the young Prince of Wales to the 
side of opposition. 

Almost prohibited, by the rules of the English 
court from bearing any important part in the go- 
vernment ; almost condemned to silence in the legis- 
lature by the custom of the constitution ; almost re- 
stricted, by the etiquette of his birth, from exerting 
himself in any of those pursuits which cheer and 
elevate a manly mind, by the noble consciousness 
that it is of value to its country ; the life of the 
eldest born of the throne appears condemned to be 
a splendid sinecure. The valley of Rasselas, with 
its impassable boundary, and its luxurious and spirit- 
subduing bowers, was but an emblem of princely 
existence; and the moralist is unfit to decide on 
human nature, who, in estimating the career, forgets 
the temptation. 



5S GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

It is neither for the purpose of undue praise to 
those who are now gone beyond human opinion, nor 
with the idle zeal of hazarding new conjectures, 
that the long exclusion of the Prince of Wales from 
public activity is pronounced to have been a signal 
injury to his fair fame. The same mental and 
bodily gifts which were lavished on the listless 
course of fashionable life, might have assisted the 
councils, or thrown new lustre on the arms, of his coun- 
try ; the royal tree, exposed to the free blasts of hea- 
ven, might have tossed away those parasite plants 
and weeds which encumbered its growth, and the 
nation might have been proud of its stateliness, and 
loved to shelter in its shade. 

The education of the royal family had been con- 
ducted with so regular and minute an attention, that 
the lapses of the prince's youth excited peculiar dis- 
pleasure in the king. The family discipline was 
almost that of a public school: their majesties gene- 
rally rose at six, breakfasted at eight with the two 
elder princes, and then summoned the younger chil- 
dren : the several teachers next appeared, and the 
time till dinner was spent in diligent application to 
languages and the severer kinds of literature, varied 
by lessons in music, drawing, and the other accom- 
plishments. The king was frequently present; the 
queen superintended the younger children, like an 
English mother. The two «lder princes laboured 
at Greek and Latin with their tutors, and were by 
no means spared in consequence of their rank. 
" How would your majesty wish to have the princes 
treated ?" was said to be Markham's inquiry of 
the king. " Like the sons of any private English gen- 
tleman," was the manly and sensible answer. " If 
they deserve it, let them be flogged ; do as you used 
to do at Westminster." 

The command was adhered to, and the royal cul- 
prits acquired their learning by the plebeian mode. 



1787] THE prince's friends. 59 

The story is told, that on the subsequent change 
oi preceptors, the command having been repeated, 
Arnald, or one of his assistants, thought proper to 
inflict a punishment, without taking into due con- 
sideration that the infants whom Markham had dis- 
cipUned with impunity were now stout boys. How- 
ever, the Prince and the Duke of York held a little 
council on the matter, and organized rebellion to 
the rod : on its next appearance they rushed upon 
the tutor, wrested his weapons from him, and exer- 
cised them with so much activity on his person, that 
the offence was never ventured again. 

Louis the Fourteenth, when, in his intercourse with 
the accomplished society of France, he felt his own 
deficiencies, often upbraided the foolish indulgence 
which had left his youth without instruction; ex- 
claiming, " Was there not birch enough in the forest 
of Fontainebleau ]" George the Third was deter- 
mined that no reproach of this nature should rest 
upon his memory ; and probably no private family in 
the empire were educated with more diligence in 
study, more attention to religious observances, and 
more rational respect for their duties to society, than 
the children of the throne. 

This course of education is so fully acknowledged 
that it has even been made a charge against the good 
sense of that excellent man and monarch ; as stimu- 
lating some of the dissipations of the prince's early 
life by the contrast between undue restraint and sud- 
den liberty. Yet the princes were under no restraint 
but from evil. They had their little sports and compa- 
nionships ; they were even, from time to time, initiated 
into such portions of court life as might be under- 
stood at their age ; children's balls were given ; the 
king, who was fond of music, had frequent concerts, 
at which the royal children were shown, dressed in 
the ribands and badges of their orders ; and in the 
numerous celebrations at Kew and Windsor, they en- 
joyed their full share. All their birthdays were kept 



60 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

with great festivity ; and August, froni its being an 
auspicious period for the royal family, as the mo-nth 
of the Hanover accession, the battle of Minden, 
and the . birth of three of the princes, w^as almost a 
continual holy day : prizes were given to the water- 
men on the Thames, sports were held in Windsor 
and Kew, and the old English time of both rustic 
and royal merriment seemed to have come again. 

There can be no difficulty in relieving the memory 
of George the Third from the charge of undue re- 
straint ; for nothing can be idler than the theory, 
that to let loose the passions of the young is to in- 
culcate self-control. Vice is not to be conquered 
by inoculation ; and the parent who gives his sons 
a taste of evil, will soon find that what he gave as 
an antidote has been swallowed as a temptation. 

The palpable misfortune of the prince was, that 
on emerging from the palace, he had still to learn 
human character, the most essential public lesson for 
his rank. Even the virtues of his parents were in- 
jurious to that lesson. Through infancy and youth 
he had seen nothing round him that could give a con- 
ception of the infinite heartlessness and artifice, the 
specious vice, and the selfish professions, that must 
beset him at his first step into life. A public educa- 
tion might have, in some degree, opened his eyes to 
the realities of human nature. Even among boys, 
some bitter evidence of the hoUowness and hypo- 
crisy of life is administered ; and the princess under- 
standing might have been early awakened to the sa- 
lutary caution, which would have cast out before 
him, naked, if not ashamed, the tribe of flatterers 
and pretended friends who so long.perverted his natu- 
ral popularity. 

But there was much in the timrs to perplex a man 
of his high station and hazardous opportunities, let 
his self-control be however vigilant. The habits 
of society have since been so much changed, that it 
is difficult to conceive the circumstances of that si]> 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 61 

gular and stirrmg- period. We live in a day of me- 
diocrity in all things. The habits of fifty years ago 
were, beyond all comparison, those of a more pro- 
minent, sho^vy, and popular system. The English 
nobleman sustained the honours of his rank with a 
larger display ; the Englishman of fashionable life 
was more conspicuous in his establishment, in his 
appearance, and even in his eccentricities: the phae- 
ton, his favourite equipage, was not more unlike the 
cabriolet, that miserable and creeping contrivance of 
our day, than his rich dress and cultivated maimers 
were like the wretched costume and low fooleries 
that make the vapid lounger of modern society. The 
women of rank, if not wiser or better than their 
successors, at least aimed at nobler objects: they 
threw open their mansions to the intelligent and ac- 
complished minds of their time, and instead oi fete- 
ing every foreign coxcomb, who came with no better 
title to respect than his grimace and his guitar, sur- 
rounded themselves with the wits, orators, and scho- 
lars of England. 

The contrivance of watering-places had not been 
then adopted as an escape, less from the heats of 
summer than from the observances of summer hos- 
pitality. The great families returned to their coun- 
try-seats with the close of parliament, and their re- 
turn was a holyday to the country. They received 
their neighbours with opulent entertainment ; cheered 
and raised the character of the humbler ranks by their 
liberality and their example ; extinguished the little 
oppressions, and low propensities to crime which ha- 
bitually grow up where the lord is an absentee ; and 
by their mere presence, and in the simple exercise 
of the natural duties of rank and wealth, were the 
great benefactors of society. A noble family of that 
time would no more have thought of flying from its 
country neighbours to creep into miserable lodgings 
at a watering-place, and hide its diminished head 
among the meager accommodations and miscella^ 

F 



62 GEORGE THE FOURTH* [1787. 

neous society of a seacoast village, than it would 
of liurning' its title-deeds. The expenses of the 
French war may have done something of this ; and 
the reduced rent-roils of the nobility may countenance 
a more limited expenditure. But whether the change 
have been in matter or mind, in the purse or the spirit, 
the change is undeniable ; and where it is not com- 
pelled by circumstances is contemptible. 

The prince was launched into public life in the 
midst of this high-toned time. With an income of 
50,000Z. a-year, he was to take the lead of the Eng* 
lish nobility, many of them with twice his income^ 
and, of course, free from the court-encumbrances of 
an official household. All princes are made to be 
plundered; and the youth, generosity, and compa* 
nionship of the prince marked him out for especial 
plunder. He was at once fastened on by every glit* 
tering profligate who had a debt of honour to dis* 
charge, by every foreign marquis who had a hijou to 
dispose of at ten times its value, by every member 
of the turf who had an unknown Eclipse or Childers 
in his stables, and by every nameless claimant on his 
personal patronage or his unguarded finance, until he 
fell into the hands of the Jews, who offered him mo* 
ney at fifty per cent.; and from them into the hands 
of political Jews, who offered him the national trea- 
sury at a price to which a hundred per cent, was mo- 
deration. 

At this time the prince was nineteen, as ripe an 
age as could be desired for ruin ; and in three short 
years the consummation was arrived at, — ^he was 
ruined. 

The Prince of Wales had now reached the second 
period of his public life. He had felt the bitterness 
of contracted circumstances, and the still keener trial 
of parliamentary appeal. His personal feelings had 
been but slightly spared in either; and we can, 
scarcely be surprised at his shrinking from the cabi- 
net, in which he had found none but baffled castiga- 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 63 

tors, and attaching himself more closely to that op- 
position in which he had found none but active and 
successful friends. 

It is certain, that few men of his rank had ever 
been more wrung by the severity of the public in- 
quisition mto the habits of their lives. Court scan- 
dals are, at all times, precious ; but the power of 
probing the wounds of princely life was never in- 
dulged in more generously for the sake of popular 
science. The newspapers, too, plunged fiercely into 
the merits on both sides, and 

" By decision more embroiled the fray." 

Those formidable, but salutary scourges of public 
error, were just beginning to assume their influence ; 
and, like all possessors of unexpected power, their 
first use of it was to lay on the lash without mercy. 
Crabbe, then young, tremulously describes the terrors 
that must have naturally startled the chaplain of a 
duke at the rise of this grand flagellator ; though, like 
all satirists, he overlooks the actual and measureless 
good in the picturesque evil. 

" But Sunday past, what numbers flourish then, 
What wondrous labours of the press and pen I 
Diurnal most, some thrice each week affords, 
Some only once ; O, avarice of words ! 
When thousand starving minds such manna seek, 
To drop the precious food but once a week ! 

Endless it were to sing the powers of all, 

Their names, their numbers, how they rise and fall, 

Like baneful herbs, the gazer's eye they seize, 

Rush to the head, and poison where they please; 

Like summer flies, a busy, buzzing train. 

They drop their maggots in the idler's brain ; 

The genial soil preserves the fruitful store. 

And there they grow, and breed a thousand more. 

* * # * * 

Nor here th' infectious rage for party stops. 
But flits along from palaces to shops ; 
Pur weekly journals o'er the land abound 
And spread their plague and influenza round. 



64 GEORGE THE FOURTH. {1787 

The village, too, the peaceful pleasant plain, 
Breeds the whig farmer, and the tory swain ; 
Brooks' and St. Alban's boast not, but instead 
Stares the red Ram, and swings the Rodney's Head. 

Here clowns delight the weekly news to con, 
And mingle comments as they blunder on ; 
To swallow all their varying authors teach, 
To spell a title, and confound a speech. 
One with a muddled spirit quits the News, 
And claims his native license, — to abuse ; 
Then joins the cry, that ' all the courtly race 
Strive but for power, and parley but for place';' 
Yet hopes, good man, that all may still be well. 
And thanks his stars— he has a vote to sell."* 

If the prince had been a man of a harsh and gloomy 
mind, he had already found matter to qualify him 
for a Timon. But his experience produced no bit^ 
terness against human nature, though it may have 
urged him into more intimate connexion with the 
party that promised at once to protect and to avenge. 
Long attracted to Fox by the social captivations of 
that singularly-gifted individual, he now completely 
joinedhimasthe politician, made friends of his friends 
and enemies of his enemies, unfurled the opposition 
banner, and all but declared himself the head of the 
great aristocratic combination, which was now more 
than ever resolved to shake the minister upon his 
throne. 

In 1792t the prince had been introduced to the 
house of peers, attended by the Dukes of Cumber- 
land, Richmond, Portland, and Lord Lewisham, and 
had spoken on the Marquis of Abercorn's motion for 
an address on the proclamation for repressing sedi- 
tious meetings. The speech was much admired for 
the grace of its delivery. It was in substance that 
— " He was educated in the principle, and he should 
ever preserve it, of a reverence for the constitutional 
liberties of the people ; and as on those liberties the 
happiness of the people depended, he was determined, 

* Poem of *' The Newspaper," published in 1784. 

t November U. „^^ . 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 65" 

as far as his interest could have any force, to sup- 
port them. The matter at issue was, whether the 
constitution was or was not to be maintained; 
whether the wild ideas of theory were to conquer the 
wholesome maxims of established practice; and 
whether those laws, under which we had flourished 
for so long a series of years, were to be subverted by 
a reform unsanctioned by the people. 

" As a person nearly and dearly interested in the 
welfare, and he would emphatically add, the happi- 
ness and comfort of the people, it would be treason 
to the principles of his mind, if he did not come for- 
ward and declare his disapprobation of those sedi- 
tious publications which had occasioned the motion 
now before their lordships ; his interest was con- 
nected with the interests of the people ; they were 
so inseparable, that unless both parties concurred, 
happiness could not exist. 

" On this great, this solid basis, he grounded the 
vote Avhich he meant to give ; and that vote should 
unequivocally be, for a concurrence with the address 
of the commons." He concluded by saying, with 
remarkable effect, — " I exist by the love, the friend- 
ship, and the benevolence of the people, and them I 
never will forsake as long as I live." 

This speech, whether suggested by the Duke of 
Portland (as was rumoured), or conceived by the 
prince, was obviously ministerial. But in those 
days, when the lord of the treasury might in the next 
month be thundering at the head of its assailants, 
and in the month after be flinging back their baffled 
bolts from the secure height of ministerial power ; 
when in one month he might be the rebellious Titan, 
and in the next the legitimate Jove, the waving of 
whose curls shook the Olympus of Downing-street 
from its summit to its base ; the rapid changes of the 
administration made ministerial allegiance curiously 
fugitive. Before the worshipper had time to throw 
himself at the foot of the altar, the idol was gone, 

F3 



66 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

and another was in possession ; before the cargo of 
fealty could reach the port, the port was in dust and 
ashes, or a hostile ensign waved upon its walls. 
North, Pitt, Shelbume, Fox, and Rockingham succes- 
sively mastered the treasury bench, within scarcely 
more months than their names; until government 
had begun to be looked on as only a more serious 
masquerade, where every man might assume every 
character in turn, and where the change of dress was 
the chief difference between the Grand Turk and his 
buffoon. 

The prince was the great political prize. From 
the hour of his infancy, when he was first shown be- 
hind his gilded lattice at St. James's to the people, 
he was the popular hope. The king's early illness, 
which made it probable that the heir might soon be 
the master of the crown, fixed the public interest 
still more anxiously upon him, and the successive 
cabinets felt the full importance of his name : but 
now the whole advantage was on the side of oppo- 
sition. England had never before seen such a 
phalanx armed against a minister. A crowd of men 
of the highest natural talents, of the most practised 
ability, and of the first public weight in birth, fortune, 
and popularity, were nightly arrayed against the ad- 
ministration, sustained by the solitary eloquence of 
the young Chancellor of the Exchequer. 

Yet Pitt was not careless of followers. He was 
more than once even charged with sedulously gather- 
ing round him a host of subaltern politicians, whom 
he might throw forward as skirmishers, — or sacri- 
fices, which they generally were. Powis, describing 
the " forces led by the right hon. gentleman on the 
treasury bench," said, " the first detachment may be 
called his body-guard, who shoot their little arrows 
against those who refuse allegiance to their chief."* 
■niis light infantry we*re, of course, soon scattered 

* Wraxall's Memoirs. 



1787.] THE fringe's friends. 0!T 

when the main battle joined. But Pitt, a son of the 
aristrv^racy, was an aristocrat in all his nature, and 
he loved to sc^ young men of family round him; 
others were cnosen for their activity, if not for their 
force, and some probably from personal liking. In 
the later period of his career, his train was swelled 
by a more influential and promising race of political 
worshippers, among whom were Lord Mornington, 
since Marquis Wellesley ; Ryder, since Lord Har- 
rowby; and Wilberforce, still undignified by title, 
but possessing an influence which, perhaps, he values 
more. The minister's chief agents in the house of 
commons were Mr. Grenville (since Lord Grenville) 
and Dundas. 

Yet, among those men of birth or business, what 
rival could be found to the popular leaders on the op- 
posite side of the house, — to Burke, Sheridan, Grev 
Windham, or to Fox, that 

"Prince and chief of many throned powers, 
Who led the embattled seraphim to war." 

Without adopting the bitter remark of the Duke de 
Montausier to Louis the Fourteenth, in speaking of 
Versailles : — " Vous avez beau faire, sire, vous n'en 
ferez jamais qu'un favori sans merite," it was impossi- 
ble to deny their inferiority on aU the great points of 
public impression. A debate in that day was one of 
the highest intellectual treats: there was always 
some new and vigorous feature in the display on both 
sides ; some striking effort of imagination or mas- 
terly reasoning, or o£ that fine sophistry, in which, 
as was said of the vices of the French noblesse, half 
the evil was atoned by the elegance. The ministe- 
rialists sarcastically pronounced that, in every debate, 
Burke said something which no one else ever said, 
Sheridan said something that no one else ought to 
say, and Fox something that no one else would 
dare to say. But the world, fairer in its decision, 
did justice to their extraordinary powers ; and found 



68 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787 

in the Asiatic amplitude and splendour of Burke, — in 
Sheridan's alternate subtlety and strength, remind- 
ing it at one time of Attic dexterity, and another of 
the uncaleulating boldness of barbarism, — and in Fox's 
matchless English self-possession, unaffected vigour, 
and overflowing sensibility, — a perpetual source of 
admiration. 

But it was in the intercourses of social life that 
the superiority of opposition was most incontestable. 
Pitt's life was in the senate : his true place of exist- 
ence was on the benches of that ministry, which he 
conducted with such unparalleled ability and success : 
he was in the fullest sense of the phrase, a public 
man ; and his indulgences in the few hours which he 
could spare from the business of office, were more 
like the necessary restoratives of a frame already 
shattered, than the easy gratifications of a man of 
society: and on this principle we can safely account 
for the common charge of Pitt's propensity to wine. 
He found it essential, to relieve a mind and body 
exhausted by the perpetual pressure of affairs : wine 
was his medicine : and it was drunk in total solitude, 
or with a few friends from whom the minister had 
no concealment. Over his wine the speeches for 
the night were often concerted ; and when the dinner 
was done, the table council broke up only to finish 
the night in the house. 

The secret history of those symposia might still 
clear up some of the problems that once exceedingly 
perplexed our politicians. On one occasion Pitt's 
silence on a motion brought forward by the present 
Earl Grey with great expectation and great effect, 
excited no less surprise, than its being replied to by 
Dundas, whose warfare generally lay among less 
hazardous antagonists. The clubs next day were in 
a fever of conjecture on this apparent surrender of a 
supremacy, of which the minister was supposed to be 
peculiarly jealous. 
. The mystification lasted until Dundas laughingly 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 69 

acknowledged that, on the nig-ht before the debate, 
Pitt and some of their immediate friends had been 
amusing themselves after dinner with imaginary 
speeches for opposition : he himself had made a bur- 
lesque speech for the motion, and Pitt enjoyed the 
idea so highly, that he insisted on his replying to the 
mover in the house, saying, "that by the law of Par- 
liament nobody could be so fit to make a speech 
against, as he who had made a speech Jbr; and that 
his only chance of escaping the charge of being a 
proselyte, was by being an assailant." When the 
debate came on, Dundas had waited for the minis- 
ter's rising, as usual ; but, to his surprise, he found 
that Pitt was determined to keep up the jest, and 
compel him, malgri, bongr^j to speak. There was 
no resource, Pitt was immoveable, and the festive 
orator, to his considerable embarrassment, was forced 
to lead. 

But wine, if a pleasant associate, is a dangerous 
master : and an after-dinner frolic is mentioned as 
having nearly cost the minister his life. Returning, 
past midnight, with his friends to Wimbledon, from 
Mr. Jenkinson's, at Croydon, they found one of the 
turnpike gates open; and, whether from the na- 
tural pleasure of baffling the turnpikeman, or of 
cheating the king, the party put spurs to their horses 
and galloped through. Those sportive personages 
were no less than the Chancellor of the Exchequer, 
the Lord Chancellor, and the Treasurer of the Navy 
—Pitt, Thurlow, and Dundas. The gate-keeper 
called after them in vain, until deciding, from their 
haste, and there having been rumours of robberies 
on the road, that they were three highwaymen, 
he summarily took the law into his own hands, and 
discharged a blunderbuss at their backs. However, 
their speed, or his being unaccustomed to shoot mi- 
nisters flying saved them ; and they had to suffer 
from nothing but those " paper bullets of the brain" 
which Beneihck so much despised. Of those they 



70 GEORGE THE FOtJRTH. [1787 

had many a volley. The Rolliad thus commemo- 
rated the adventure : ' 

*' Ah think what danger on debauch attends ! 
Let Pitt, o'er wine, preach temperance to his friends, 
How, as he wandered darkling o'er the plain. 
His reason drowned in Jenkinson's champaign, ; 

A rustic's hand, but righteous fate withstood, i 

Had shed a premier's for a robber's blood." 

But those were rare condescensions to society m 
the premier. From remaining unmarried, he was 
without an establishment ; for the attempt which he 
made to form one, with his fantastic relative Lady 
Hester Stanhope at its head, soon wearied him, and 
he escaped from it to the easier hospitality of Mr. 
Dundas, whose wife, Lady Jane, was a woman of 
remarkable intelhgence, and much valued by Pitt. 
His official dinners were generally left to the ma- 
nagement of Steele, one of the secretaries of the trea- 
sury. I 

But with Fox all was the bright side of the picture. 
His extraordinary powers defied dissipation. No 
public man of England ever mingled so much per- 
sonal pursuit of every thing in the form of indul- 
gence with so much parliamentary activity. From 
the dinner he went to the debate, from the debate to 
the gaming-table, and returned to his bed by day- 
light, freighted with parliamentary applause, plun- 
dered of his last disposable guinea, and fevered with 
sleeplessness and agitation; to go through the same 
round within the next twenty-four hours. He kept no 
house ; but he had the houses of all his party at his 
disposal, and that party were the most opulent and 
sumptuous of the nobility. Cato and Antony were 
not more unlike, than the public severity of Pitt, and 
the native and splendid dissoluteness of Fox. i 

They were unlike in all things. Even in such 
slight peculiarities as their manner of walking into 
the house of commons, the contrast was visible. 



1787.] THE PRINCE S FRIENDS* 71 

From the door Pitt's countenance was that of a man 
who felt that he was coming into his high place of 
business. " He advanced up the floor with a quick 
firm step, with the head erect and thrown back, look- 
ing to neither the right nor the left, nor favouring 
with a glance or a nod any of the individuals seated 
on either side, among whom many of the highest 
would have been gratified by such a mark of recog- 
nition."* Fox's entrance was lounging or stately, 
as it might happen, but always good-humoured ; he 
had some pleasantry to exchange with everybody, 
and until the moment when he rose to speak, con- 
tinued gayly talking with his friends. 

As the royal residences were all occupied by the 
king, or the younger members of the royal family, 
the prince was forced to find a country-seat for him- 
self; and he selected Brighton, then scarcely more 
than a little fishing village, and giving no conception 
of the seashore London that it has since become. 
Our national rage for covering every spot of the land 
with brick, and blotting out the sky with the smoke 
of cities linked to cities, had not then become epi- 
demic ; and Brighton, in all its habits, was as far re- 
moved from London as Inverness : but its distance, 
not above a morning's drive for the rapid charioteer- 
ing of his royal highness, made it eligible ; and at 
Brighton he purchased a few acres, and began to 
build. 

Probably no man has ever begun to build, without 
having the prince's tale to tell. Walpole advises a 
man never to lay the first stone, until he has settled 
his children, buried his wife, and hoarded three times 
the amount of the estimate. There is no royal road 
to building ; and the prince soon found that he must 
undergo the common lot of all who tempt their fate 
with architecture. 

♦ Wraxall. 



72 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

His first work was a cottage in a field. The 
cottage was a singularly pretty and picturesque 
little fabric, in a small piece of ground where a few 
shrubs and roses shut out the road, and the eye 
looked unobstructed over the ocean. But visiters 
naturally came, and the cottage was found small. 
The prince's household and visiters gradually in- 
creased, and there was then no resource but in a 
few additional apartments. It was at last found that 
those repeated improvements were deformities, and 
that their expense would be better employed in 
making a complete change. 

From this change grew the present Pavilion ; the 
perpetual ridicule of tourist wit, and certainly un- 
suited in style to its present encumbered and narrow 
site, and perhaps to European taste. But if no man 
is a hero to his valet-de-chambre, no man is a prince 
to his architect. Whatever be his repugnance, he is 
bound hand and foot by the dictator of taste ; is ac- 
countable for nothing, but the rashness of surrendering 
himself at discretion ; and has henceforth nothing to 
do but to bear the public pleasantry as patiently as 
he may, and consider how he shall pay his biU. 

Yet the happiest hours of the prince's life were 
spent in this cottage. But it is not for men of his 
condition to expect the quiet of an humbler and more 
fortunate situation, the happy, honeyed lapse of years 
occupied only in cultivating the favourite tastes or 
the gentle affections of the human heart. He was 
too important to the public, in all senses of the word, 
to be suffered to enjoy the ^^jucunda oblivia" which 
every man of common knowledge of life feels to be 
among its best privileges. He was too essential to 
the objects of the great competitors for power ; to the 
multitude, who look upon the purse of princes as 
their own ; and even to the general eagerness of the 
populace for royal anecdote, to be left unmolested 
in any retreat, however remote or secluded. His 
best quiet was only that of the centre of a vortex ; 



1787.] THE prince's frienbs. 73 

and he was scaicely suffered to make the experiment 
of ease, when the question of the Regency led, or 
rather flung, him into that sea of troubled and con- 
flicting interests from which he was destined never 
to emerge. 

His royal highness had joined the Foxites almost 
at the commencement of his public life. The capti- 
vation of Fox's manners, the freedom from restraint 
which he found in the society of which Fox was the 
idol, and the actual elegance and high life of the 
whig circle, were probably the chief sources of his 
choice. For what could be the politics of a handsome 
boy of nineteen, living in a perpetual round of enter- 
tainments, with nothing to take care of but his 
beauty, and with all the world saying civil things to 
him, and he saying civil things to all the world ? But, 
once fairly in the harness of party, the only difficulty 
was to keep him from overturning the machine by 
his eagerness. 

In the debates on the celebrated India bill, which 
Fox called the pyramid of the British power, but 
which he might more justly have called the mauso- 
leum of his own ; the Prince of Wales made himself 
conspicuous to a degree, which brought down strong 
charges of influence on his friends ; and certainly 
embarrassed North and Fox, already almost over- 
borne by national displeasure. It was remarked on 
the prince's frequent presence in the house of com- 
mons during this perilous discussion, that " if the 
great personage in question, not content with merely 
listening to the debates, should, on any occasion, 
testify by his behaviour or gesticulation, while in the 
house, a predilection or partiality for any set of men ; 
such marks of his preference would be unbecoming, 
and might operate as a means of influence." Lord 
North delicately defended the practice, by a panegyric 
on the prince's " eminent abilities," and by expressing 
his personal gratification in seeing " a prince to whom 
the country must look up as its hope, thus practically 

G 



74 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787, 

becoming acquainted with the nature of this limited 
government, rather than taking up the hearsay of 
the hour, or looking for his knowledge to flatterers." 
Fox, with his usual boldness, dashed out at once 
into lofty invective on the charges, " pernicious and 
ridiculous alike, adopted by no less the enemies of 
free discussion in that house, than the calumniators 
of the motives of a distinguished personage, whose 
whole spirit was honour." — " Was the mind which 
might, at any hour, by the common chances of mor- 
tality, be summoned to the highest duties allotted to 
man, to be left to learn them by accident 1 Was he 
to be sent to discover the living spirit of the consti- 
tution in the dust of libraries, or in the unintelligible 
compilations of black-letter law ; or to receive it 
from the authority of the politicians, pious or other- 
wise, who had doled out doctrines to the house, which 
the house and the country, he believed, had heard 
with equal astonishment, however popular they might 
,^ be in the inquisition, or perhaps in the conventicle ? 
For his part, he rejoiced to see that distinguished per- 
sonage disdaining to use the privileges of his rank, 
and keep aloof from the debates of that house. He 
rejoiced to see him manfully coming among them, to 
imbibe a knowledge of the constitution, within the 
walls of the commons of England. He, for his part, 
saw nothing in the circumstances which had called 
down so much volunteer eloquence and unnecessary 
reprobation, but a ground for praise ; an evidence of 
the British mind of that high personage, and a prac- 
tical pledge to the free institutions of the country." 
The member alluded to as the conventicle orator 
was Sir Richard Hill, brother of the preacher, who 
had the foolish and indecorous habit of introducing 
Scripture phraseology into his speeches, — a habit by 
which, without increasing any man's respect for the 
Scriptures, he naturally brought himself into constant 
ridicule. Sir Richard was often thus more trouble- 
some to his fricads than to his enemies. One eve- 



1787.] 



THE PRINCE'S FRIENDS. 71^ 



ningjin contrasting Pitt's influence at St. James's with 
Fox's full-blown power in the house, he burst upon th<? 
astonished audience with the information, that " the 
honest Israelite, Mordecai, repaired privately to court, 
and averted the danger which thieatened the people 
frDm Haman's ambition, who, being driven from the 
cabinet, was finally suspended from a gibbet." 

The comparison with the Israelite, intended as a 
matchless compliment to Pitt, was received by him 
without a smile ; and he was probably the only man 
in the house whose countenance did not wear one. 

The RoUiad, which spared none on the ministerial 
side, naturally delighted in such a victim. 

*' Brother of Rowland I or, if yet more dear 
Sounds thy new title, cousin of a peer ; 
Scholar of various learning, good and evil, 
Alike what Heaven inspir&d, and what the Devil ; 
Speaker well skilled, what no man reads to write, 
Sleep-giving poet of a sleejiless night; 
Polemic, politician, saint, and wit, 
Now lashing Madan, now defending Pitt : 
Thy praise shall live till time itself be o'er, 
♦ Friend of king George, but of king Jesus more.'" 

The last line was verbally one of Sir Richard's 
declarations. The critical knife was again plunged 
deep : — 

4» # # # # * # 

*',His reverend jokes see pious Richard cut ; 
Let meaner talents from the Bible draw 
Their faith, their morals these, and those their law. 
His lively genius finds in holy writ 
A richer mine of unsuspected wit ; 
What never Jew, what never Christian taught. 
What never fired one sectary's heated thought, 
What not even Rowland dreamed, he saw alone, 
And to the wondering senate first made known, 
How bright o'er mortal jokes the Scriptures shine." 
m ***** * 

To Fox the prince'-s connexion was a tower of 
strength. For it partially discountenanced the ru- 
mours, that in his fall he had abandoned more than 
place, and was imbittered not only against his sue- 



76 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787 

cessful antagonists, but against the laws and the 
throne. As Pope said to Prince Frederic, on being 
asked "how he contrived to feel so much regard for 
princes, and so little for kings ?" that " he was afraid 
of the full-grown lion, but could play with it before 
its teeth and claws were come;" Fox might have 
liked or loved the heir to the monarchy, however in- 
dignant at the grasp of the monarch himself; but 
his association with the prince may have done even 
more than assisted his public name. In the pro- 
verbial madness of ambition, the contumacious tem- 
per of the time, and the angry workings of utter de- 
feat upon a powerful and impassioned mind, there 
was formidable temptation to the great demagogue. 

Too generous and too lofty in his habits to stoop 
to vulgar conspiracy ; perhaps, alike too abhorrent 
of blood, and too fond of his ease, to have exhibited 
the reckless vigour, or endured the long anxieties, 
or wrapped up his mystery in the profound conceal- 
ment of a Catiline; he had all the qualities that 
might have made a Cains Gracchus, — the eloquence, 
the ingenuousness of manner, the republican simpli- 
city of life, and the showy and specious zeal of po- 
pularity in all its forms. Fox would have made the 
first of tribunes. He unquestionably possessed the 
means, at that period, to have become the most dan- 
gerous subject of England. 

Fox's life is a memorable lesson to the pride .of 
talents. With every kind of public ability, every 
kind of public opportunity, and an unceasing and 
indefatigable determination to be at the summit in 
all things, his whole life was a succession of disap- 
pointments. It has been said, that, on commencing 
his parliamentary course, he declared that there 
were three objects of his ambition, and that he 
would attain them all: — that he should be the most 
popular man in England, the husband of the hand- 
somest woman, and prime minister. He did attain 
them all ; but in what diminished and illusory degree. 



17fJ7.] THE PRINCE'S FRIENDS. 77 

how the "juggling fiend kept the promise to the ear, 
and broke it to the hope," is long since known. He 
was the most popular man in England, if the West- 
minster electors were the nation ; his marriage se- 
cured him beauty, if it secured him nothing else; 
and his premiership lasted scarcely long enough for 
him to appear at the levee. In a life of fifty-eight 
years. Fox's whole existence as a cabinet minister 
was but nineteen months ; while Pitt, ten years his 
junior, and dying at forty-seven, passed almost his 
whole life, from his entrance into parliament, at the 
head of the country. 

The public and parliamentary language of the time 
was contemptuous of all government. Junius had 
set the example, by insulting, not only the throne, 
but the private habits and personal feelings of the 
sitter on the throne. Going beyond the audacity of 
Cromwell, who declared that " if he saw the king 
opposite to him in the field, he would fire his carbine 
into his bosom as soon as into any other man's ;'* 
Junius adopted the joint fierceness and insolence of 
Home Tooke, who declared that " he would fire into 
the king's bosom sooner than into any other man's." 
English libel had, till then, assailed only the public 
life of royalty ; Junius was the subtle traitor who 
dropped poison into the cup at its table. The ability 
of the writer is undoubted; but its uses deprive it 
of all the higher admiration due to the exercise of 
ability in an honest cause. The remorseless and 
malignant venom of this political seipent destroys 
all our praise of its force and beauty. While the 
school of Junius continued to be the model of Eng- 
lish political writing, a ceaseless perversion was fes- 
tering and enfeebling the public sense of truth, ju§3u— 
tice, and honour. 

Perhaps the safety of the constitution at that hour 
was owing to that personal character on which the 
whole host of pamphleteering turned all their 
artillery. A king jealous of his authority would 

G 2 



78 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787 

have haug-htily avenged it by a stretch of his power ; 
a vindictive king- would have fiercely torn away the 
covering from his libellers, and in lashing them have 
hazarded blows at higher interests ; an ambitious 
king would have grasped at the opportunity always 
offered by popular license to royal aggression, have 
raised up against the mob barriers from which he 
might afterward menace the nation, and have more 
than retaliated as a tyrant all that he had suffered 
as a victim. 

But George the Third confided his quarrel to his 
virtues ; he saw deeper than the ostentatious saga- 
city of those declaimers and insulters into the true 
character of the people ; he knew that those furious 
gusts and " yesty waves" of sedition were pass- 
ing and superficial things ; that the time must come 
when the great expanse, the depth and breadth of 
the public mind of the empire, would find its level, 
and be open to the light ; and in pious and manly 
resignation he awaited his time. 

The failure of the American war had concentred 
upon the king the whole weight of party obloquy. 
Lord North, terrified at his own responsibility, instead 
of standing before the throne, flung himself at its 
feet ; and exhibited the repulsive spectacle of a first 
minister without resource in himself or in his friends , 
and after having exhausted the royal means by his 
struggle for power, encumbering the royal person by 
his weakness. But if we may forgive the popular 
ignorance in its wrath for the loss of America, with 
what feeling shall we listen to the language of the 
great senatorial authorities ? History never gave a 
sterner rebuke to political foresight. " What," said 
Lord Chatham, in the famous speech which he 
almost died uttering ; " what is to be the compensa- 
tion for the thirteen colonies? Where are we to 
look for it? I never will consent to deprive the 
royal offspring of the House of Brunswick of their 
fairest inheritance. Where is the man who darei 
advise such a measure ?'* 



1787.] THE PRINCE'S FRIENDS. 79 

The sentiment branded itself on the reputation of 
all the leading statesmen. 

" When I hear," said Lord George Germaine, " tne 
topic of abandoning the colonies calmly proposed, I 
own my astonishment ; I own that I cannot com- 
prehend the proposal ; I see in it only national ruin. 
I own I have not that philosophic equanimity, that 
more than political nerve, which can contemplate 
without shuddering the opening of a gulf into which 
all that is valuable in the British empire must inevi- 
tably be merged. I must pause, I must tremble, 
when I stand on its edge ; for it is my firm belief, 
that from the moment of acknowledging the inde- 
pendence of America, England is ruined^ 

Lord Shelburne, a minister not celebrated for 
rashly giving way to his feelings, exceeded, if possi- 
ble, the melancholy prophecies of Chatham and 
Germaine. Even when first lord of the treasury,* 
and with all the restrictions of official speech ; he 
could glow on this subject, and ominously pro- 
nounce, that, — " in whatever year, in whatever hour, 
the British parliament should lose the sovereignty of-" 
the thirteen colonies the sun of England's glory was 
for ever set. He had hoped that there would be 
some reserve for national safety, if not* for national 
honour ; that a spark at least would be left, which 
might light us up in time to a new day. But if inde- 
pendence were once conceded, if parliament consider- 
ed that measure to be advisable, he, for his part, must 
avow his belief; he foresaw, in his own mind, that 
England was undone .'" 

Such was the wisdom of the wise ; or rather, such 
was at once the blindness which could not see that 
the growing patronage of the colonies, if they had 
remained a few years longer in our hands, must have 
given the minister a power deadly to a free consti- 
tution; the political selfishness of arrogating to 
England a perpetual dominion which no authority - 

* April, 1778. 
* See Note W.—Page 413. 



80 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

three thousand miles off could wisely administer, but 
which must cramp and wither the prosperity of a 
young continent by the burdepis and institutes of an 
old island ; and not less the ungenerous neglect, or 
the narrow and ungrateful disregard of those immea- 
surable means of strength, happiness, and national 
stabihty, which Providence has lavished on Great 
Britain. But we can scarcely be surprised that opi- 
nions thus inculcated by the gravest names of politi- 
cal council, voices that came like oracles, should 
have sunk deep into the popular bosom. A bittei 
repugnance to every act of the throne was rapidly 
engendered, thoughts of a general change began to be 
familiar, and the language of the principal members 
of opposition assumed a tone, at whose uncalled-for 
violence we can now only wonder. Dunning, though 
a lawyer, and at an age not likely to be inflamed by 
enthusiasm, the keen, cold man of jurisprudence, ac- 
tually moved, in the house of commons, that the 
power of dissolving parliament should be taken 
from the crown ; his motion being, that* " the par- 
liament should not be dissolved, nor the session pro- 
rogued, until proper measures were adopted for 
diminishing the influence of the crown, and correcting 
the other evils complained of in the petitions." Fox 
carried his sentiments still further, and coming hot 
from the contact of the Corresponding Society, and 
full of the popular grievance of seeing a body of sol- 
diers placed to protect the members of the house 
from insult, unhesitatingly declared, that " if the sol- 
diery were to be thus let loose on the assemblages 
of the people, the people who attended them must go 
arrned." Mirabeau's famous declaration in the 
national assembly, that "if the king desired the 
French deputies to retire, it must be at the point of 
the bayonet," the watchword of the revolution, was 
iearcely more defying than this menace, 

♦ April, 1780. 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 81 

But tbe better genius of Eng^land prevailed. The 
statesman shrank from the hideous worship of the 
devil of revolution. He could not pass at once from 
the princely banquet to the squalidness and obscene 
riot of the democratic carousal. He grew weary of 
the furious fondness and the irrational hate of the 
populace ; his angry temperament cooled, his natural 
tastes were restored, and long before the close of his 
life, Fox was, what he had begun, the high aristocrat 
by habit, by association, and by nature. He still con- 
tinued member for Westminster, and he made his 
customary periodic appeals to party. But if he wore 
the robes of the worship, he had abandoned the fana- 
ticism; he no longer menaced the institutions of 
England with the fierce fervour of his old prophecies 
of evil ; he no more shook against the throne the 
brand snatched from the revolutionary altar ; he still 
went through the established ceremonial ; but when 
it was done, he cast aside the vestments, and hastened 
to be the companion of nobles and princes again. 

The society at the Pavilion was remarkably at- 
tractive ; no prince in Europe passed so much of his 
time in society expressly chosen by himself. Intel- 
ligent conversation is the great charm of man, the 
finest solace of intellectual labour, and the simplest 
yet most effectual and delightful mode of at once 
resting and invigorating the mind, whether wearied 
by study, or depressed by struggles Math fortune. 
Next to the power of extensive benevolence, there is 
no privilege of princes which the wisdom of humbler 
life may be so justified in desiring, as their power of 
collecting accomplished minds from the whole range 
of the community. The Prince of Wales availed him- 
self largely of this privilege. It happened that Eng- 
lish society at this period singularly abounded with 
men of conspicuous ability. To his royal highness, 
of course, all were accessible ; and though his asso 
ciates were chiefly men of rank or of high political 



82 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787, 

name, yet talents, grace of manners, and conversa- 
tional brilliancy were the principle of selection. 

Frederic the Great had attempted to draw round 
him a circle of this kind. But he chose ill : for he 
chose dependants, and those Frenchmen. His own 
habits were querulous and supercilious ; and as the 
fashions of royalty are quickly adopted by its asso- 
ciates, Frederic's coterie was in a state of perpetual 
warfare. Voltaire led the battle, and when he had 
sneered his companions out of all resistance, he fell 
on the monarch himself. No man in a state of per- 
fect idleness can be satisfied with his life ; and the 
Frenchmen had nothing to do but to quarrel, invent 
scandals, and yawn. 

Thiebault, one of the chosen dwellers in the para- 
dise of Sans Souci, tells us, that their only occupation 
from morning till night was conjugating the verb 
s''ennuyer, through all persons, moods, and tenses. 
Frederic treated them like monkeys in a cage, came 
in from the council or the parade to amuse himself for 
the half-hour with looking at their tricks and their 
visages; then turned on his heel, left them to the 
eternal weariness of their prison, and went about the 
business of the world. The Frenchmen at last 
slipped, one by one, out of this gilded menagerie ; 
ran off" to Paris, the only spot where a Frenchman 
can live ; and libelled the royal wit and infidel with a 
pungency and profligacy even superior to his own, 
until they turned the " Grand Frederic" into a public 
laugh in every corner of Europe beyond the lash of 
his drum- majors. 

Frederic, Prince of Wales, the grandfather of his 
late majesty, had also attempted to collect a familiar 
and literary society round him. But the attempt 
was a reluctant one, and it naturally failed. It was 
Lyttelton's suggestion as a source of popularity ; and 
it humiliated Thomson and Mallet, by making them 
pensioners on an individual. Authorship, to be wor- 
thy of public honour, cannot shrink too sensitively 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 83 

from personal protection. The past age scandalized 
the natural rank of genius. But a wiser, because a 
more dignified, feeling now prevails among men of 
literary name. They appeal only to the public, and 
honourably disdain to stoop to the degradation of 
any patronage below that of the people and the 
throne. 



CHAPTER VII. 

The Prince's Friends, 



The prince's table afforded the display of men too 
independent by both their place in society, and their 
consciousness of intellectual power, to feel them- 
selves embarrassed by the presence of superior rank. 
Hare, Jekyll, Fitzpatrick, Erskine, with the great 
parliamentary leaders, were constant guests, and the 
round was varied by the introduction of celebrated 
foreigners, and other persons capable of adding to 
the interest of the circle. 

Hare, " the Hare and many friends," as he was 
called by the clever Dutchess of Gordon, in allusion 
to Gay's fable and his own universal favouritism, 
was then at the head of conversational fame. Like 
Johnson's objection to Topham Beauclerk — " Sir, a 
man cannot dine with him and preserve his self-ap- 
plause ; sir, no man who gives a dinner should so 
overwhelm his guests" — Hare's chief fault was 
said to be his superabundant pleasantry; a talent 
which suffered nothing among his friends or enemies 
to escape, yet which had the rare good fortune of 
being pointed without ceasing to be playful. 

Some of the sayings of the circle are still remem- 
bered. But if they are given here in the miscella- 



84 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [178T. 

neous and accidental order of their transpiring in the 
chances of society, it is by no means without a suffi- 
cient feeling, that the repetition of a bon-mot can 
seldom give more than a proof of the fading nature 
of pleasantry. The occasion is all. The prompt- 
ness of the idea, the circumstances, the company, 
even the countenance, are essential to its poignancy. 
The revived pleasantry is a portrait drawn from the 
dust, and the originals of whose features have passed 
away — the amusement of a masquerade, when we 
have nothing of the masquerade left but the mask 
and the robe. If actors " come like shadows, so de- 
part ;" the fame of wits is still more fugitive ; until 
it is scarcely paradoxical to say, that the security of 
their fame depends on the speed of our consigning 
all its specimens to oblivion. Selwyn was the wit 
par excellence of his day, and so paramount, that he 
turns even Horace Walpole into a worshipper : Wal- 
pole, himself a wit, and as full of the keenest venom 
of the smallest ambition, as any man who ever pros- 
trated himself to a court and libelled it. Yet Sel- 
wyn's best sayings are now remarkable for scarcely 
more than their stiffness, their sulkiness, or their 
want of decorum. They are stamped with bald, 
dry antiquity ; and are perfectly worthy of the fate 
which has, a second time in our age, sent the skele- 
ton to the grave. 

The merit of Hare's Jeux-d'esprit was their readi- 
ness and their oddity. — Fox, after the fall of the co- 
ahtion, coming to dinner at the Pavilion just as he 
had returned from London, and apologizing for ap- 
pearing in liis dishabille and without powder : 

" Oh," said Hare, " make no apology ; our great 
guns are discharged, and now we may all do without 
powder. 

" Pleasant news, this, from America," said he, 
meeting General Fitzpatrick on the first intelligence 
of Burg03^ne's defeat. The general doubted, and re- 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 8^ 

plied, " that he had just come from the secretary of 
state's office without hearing- any thing of it." " Per- 
haps so," said Hare, " but take it from me as a flying 
rumour." 

Fox's negligence of his fortune had induced hia 
friends to find out a wife for him among the great 
heiresses. Miss Pulteney, afterward Countess of 
Bath, was fixed upon ; and Fox, though probably 
without any peculiar inclination to the match, paid 
his court for a while. A seat was frequently left for 
him beside the lady, and he made his attentions ra- 
ther conspicuous during Hastings's trial. Some one 
observed to Hare the odd contrast between Fox's 
singularly dark complexion, and Miss Pulteney's 
pale face and light hair. " What a strange sort of 
children they will make," was the observation. 
*' Why, duns, to be sure," replied Hare ; " cream-co- 
loured bodies, with black manes and tails." 

Fox was more celebrated for fulness of conversa^. 
tion, for the outpouring of an abundant mind than 
for piquancy of phrase. His animation was un- 
equal, and there were periods when a stranger might 
have pronounced him even taciturn. But those times 
were generally brief; a sudden influx of ideas would 
seem to fertilize his mind, and he then overbore every 
thing by the richness and variety of his conceptions. 
Yet the chief remembrances of Fox in private so- 
ciety are some little poems, thrown off with the care- 
lessness of the moment, and deriving their principal 
value from his name. 

The Dutchess of Devonshire applied to him for a 
charade. " On what subject ?" said Fox. " The hap- 
piest of all subjects — ^myself," was the laughing re- 
ply. Fox took his pencil, and on the back of a let- 
ter wrote the lines so often since made the property 
of wits and lovers in distress : 

H 



86 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787 

Myjirst is myself in a very short "word, 

My aecond's a plaything, 

i\jQd you are my third. (Idol.) 

His lines on the Rose are pretty and pathetic .— 

The rose, the sweetly hlooming rose. 

Ere from the tree 'tis torn, 
Is like the cliarm which beauty shows 

In life's exulting morn. 

But ah, how soon its sweets are gone, 

The rose-bud withering lies. 
So, long ere life's pale eve comes on, 

The flower of beauty dies. 

But, since the fairest heaven e'er made 

Soon withering we shall find, 
Be thine, sweet girl, what ne'er shall fade, 

The beauties of the mind. 

The well-known lines on Poverty, and on Mrs. 
Crewe, are of a higher order. But all those things 
are trifles, which might be produced by any pen, and 
which can be given only as instances of the occa- 
sional lightness of a grave and powerful mind. Fox's 
triumphs were all parliamentary. But his conversa- 
tion, when he was " i' the vein," is always spoken 
of as leaving us only to regret that so little of it re- 
mains. 

One evening at Devonshire House, some remark 
happening to be made on the skill of the French in 
emblems, the Dutchess playfully said, " that it would 
be impossible to find an emblem for her." Several 
attempts were made with various success. The 
Dutchess still declared herself dissatisfied. At 
length Fox took up a cluster of grapes and presented 
it to her, with the motto, " Je plais jusqu'a IHvresse ;'* 
his superiority was acknowledged by acclamation. 

Burke was contending, in his usual enthusiastic- 
manner, for the possibility of raising Italy to her for- 
mer rank ; and instanced, that several nations wliicb 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 87 

had sunk under the sword had risen again. Fox ar- 
gued that her ruin was irretrievable, and that the 
very tardiness and tranquillity of her decay made 
restoration hopeless. "The man," said he, "who 
breaks his bones by being flung from a precipice, 
may have them mended by his surgeon. But what 
hope is there when they have dissolved away in the 
grave ?" 

A high official personage, since dead, noto 
rious for his parsimony, and peculiarly for his reluc- 
tance to contribute to charitable institutions, was 
seen at a charity sermon for some school, in which 
Fox and Sheridan were accidently interested. How 
far the sermon had acted on this noble person's libe- 
rality became a question over the table. " I think 
he gave his pound," said Sheridan. " Irnpossible," 
said Fox, " the rack could not have forced such a 
sum from him ; or, he must think that he is going to 
die." " Poh," was Sheridan's reply, " the sum is not 
much ; even Judas threw away twice the money.'* 
" Yes," returned Fox ; " but how long was it before 
he was hanged 1" 

Gibbon, one of the most fastidious of men, and 
disposed by neither party nor personal recollections 
to be enamoured of Fox, describes his conversation 
as admirable. They met at Lausanne, spent a day 
without other company, " and talked the whole day :" 
the test was sufficiently long under any circum- 
Btances, but Gibbon declares that Fox never flagged ; 
his animation and variety of topic were inexhaust- 
ible. 

Major Doyle, the present Gen. Sir John Doyle, 
who after a course of renown in the field and the 
senate, is still the life of his circle, and abounds in 
the spirit and pleasantry of his early years ; was, 
for a long period, private secretary to the prince, 
rhe choice had nothing to do with politics or Eng- 



88 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

lish connexions, for Doyle was an Irishman and a 
stranger, or known only by his character for wit and 
eloquence in the Irish parliament, where he had at- 
tained a high rank among opposition. The prince, 
already acquainted with his name, met him in the 
crowd of an enormous London route, was struck 
with his obvious intelligence, and invited him at the 
moment to accompany a large party who were going 
to spend the week at the Pavilion. There the first 
impression was so fully confirmed, that he offered 
him the private secretaryship, and Doyle was thence- 
forth one of the stars of the Brighton galaxy. It is 
an honour to this distinguished gentleman and sol- 
dier, that neither time nor circumstance has worn 
away his feelings for his royal friend : to whom, on 
all occasions, he unequivocally and eloquently gives 
the tribute of having been the most attractive and 
accomplished man whom he ever met, in the range 
of a life spent in the best society of Europe ; as the 
most open-hearted and even-tempered of human be- 
ings, during the entire period of their intercourse ; 
as possessing a remarkable degree of knowledge, 
peculiarly on militaiy subjects ; and, on the whole, 
as gifted with acquirements and abilities which, if 
the field for their exertion had not been so stemlj'- 
closed at the commencement of his public life, must 
have placed the Prince of Wales among the most 
popular and eminent individuals who ever inherited 
the British throne. 

The charges of caprice, and of those sudden 
checks of familiarity which have been subsequently 
laid against him, if they were not founded more in 
the foolish presumption of those who made them, 
than of him who might have had no other means of 
repulsing unworthy society, seem to have had no 
existence at this period. The table was free and 
equal; the prince enjoyed his witticism, and bore 
its reply; and perhaps at no table in England 
was theye more ease, liveliness, or freedom from 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 89 

the royal frown that looks down subjects into 
silence. 

On the king's opening the session of parliament, 
the prince had gone in state in a military uniform 
with diamond epaulettes. At dinner Doyle came in 
late, and, to the prince's inquiry whether he had seen 
the procession ? answered, that he had been among 
the mob, " who prodigiously admired his royal high- 
ness's equipage." " And did they say nothing else ?" 
asked the prince, who was at this time a good deal 
talked of, from his encumbrances. 

"Yes. One fellow, looking at your epaulette, 
said, ' Tom, what an amazing fine thing the prince 
has got on his shoulders !' * Ay,' answered the other, 
* fine enough, and fine as it is it will soon be on our 
shoulders.^ " The prince paused a moment, then 
looked Doyle in the face, and laughing, said, " Ah ! 
I know where that hit came from, you rogue ; that 
could be nobody's but yours. Come, take some wine." 

Curran, the celebrated Irish barrister, was a fre- 
quent guest at the Pavilion, and all his recollections of 
it were panegyrical. He said, and this atatime when 
his intercourse with courts, and nearly with life, was 
at an end; that, considered as a test of colloquial 
liveliness and wit, he had never met any thing supe- 
rior to the prince's table, and that the prince himself . 
was among the very first there ; that he had never met 
any man who kept him more on the qui vive ; and 
if his own habits might have given him a little more 
practice, the prince " fairly kept up at saddle-skirts 
with him." 

St. Leger, a showy Irishman, coming to London, 
and being extensively known from his connexions 
and manners, had availed himself of the hospitalities 
of whig and tory alike ; and on his first dinner at 
the Pavilion, was laughingly taken to task for his 
indiscriminate taste for the burgundy of both sides. ; 

H3 



90 GEORGE THE TOURTH. [1787. 

The Irishman defended himself gallantly, and said, 
that he sa';v^ no difference of principle in beauty or 
burgundy; but that, "love or drink where he would, 
he would always adhere to his political friends." - 

" St. Leger is quite right," said the prince ; " he 
promises like the prospectus of a newspaper,-— 
* open to all parties, hut influenced by none.' " 

The Lewes races were thinly attended, in conse- 
quence of a rainy day. The prince and a few per- 
sons of rank were there, and underwent a drenching. 
On their return, some observation was made on the 
smaU number of noblemen on the course. " I beg 
pardon," said the prince; "I think I saw a very 
handsome sprinkling of the nobility." 

The conversation turning on some new eccentri- 
city of Lord George Gordon, his unfitness for a mob 
leader was instanced in his suffering the rioters of 
1780 to break open the gin-shops, and, in particular, 
to intoxicate themselves by the plunder of Langdale's 
great distillery, in Holborn. "But why did not 
Langdale defend his property 1" was the question. 
" He had not the means," was the answer. " Not 
the means of defence ?" said the prince ; " ask An- 
gelo : he, a brewer, a feUow all his hfe long at cart 
and tierce" 

The prince's regiment were expecting orders for 
Ireland. St. Leger said that garrison duty in Dublin 
was irksome, and that country quarters were so 
squalid that they would destroy the lace and uni- 
forms of the regiment, which, even then, were re- 
markably rich. " Well, then," said the prince, " let 
them do their duty as dragoons, and scour the country.'* 

A heavy-heeled cavalry officer, at one of the 
Brighton balls, astounded the room by the pecuHar 
tmpressimness of his dancing. A circle of lighted 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 91 

ladies fluttered over to the prince, and inquired, 
by what possibility they could escape being tram- 
pled out of the world by this formidable per- 
former. " Nothing can be done," said the prince, 
"since the war is over: then he might have been 
sent back to America as a republication of the stamp 
act." 

Home Tooke was committed to prison on a charge 
of treason, which he bore so loftily, that he was said 
to have an intention of establishing regular club 
dinners in the jail. 

" The parson had better give a masquerade, and 
appear as TartufFe," said Sheridan. " No ; a concert 
is the thing," said the prince : " Newgate is a capital 
place for a ketch club." 

Sheridan was detailing the failure of Fox's match 
with Miss Pulteney. " I never thought that any thing 
would result from it," said the prince. " Then," re- 
plied Sheridan, " it was not for want of sighs : he sat 
beside her cooing like a turtle dove." 

" He never cared about it," said the prince ; " he 
fiaw long ago that it was a coup manqu^.^^ 

At a later period, one of the newspapers quoted a 
speech of Sir Joseph Yorke, who, in his usual good- 
humoured style, said, at some public dinner in win- 
ter, " that, for his part, in such society, he knew no 
difference of politics or seasons. And that a coal 
fire, champaign, and good company might turn win- 
ter into summer at any day of the year." 

" Shakspeare and Sir Joseph agree," said the 
prince : 

" Now is the winter of our discontent 
Made gl(»ious summer by the Son of Torke.^ 

In Cyril Jackson's visits to Brighton, the conver- 
sation frequently turned on points of literature. On 



92 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

one occasion, the prince quoted a phrase from 
Homer. Jackson doubted, the prince persisted. 
" Well, then," said the old man, with the freedom 
of foimer preceptorship, "if that be the line, you 
have got it by heart to puzzle me : you have par- 
roted it." " Let the Homer be brought," said the 
prince, " and now see if I have parroted it." The 
book was brought, and he repeated half the page from 
memory. Jackson was delighted. "Ah!" said he, 
" I knew that you would be a scholar ; and it was I 
who made you one." 

Fox disliked Dr. Parr; who, however, whether 
from personal admiration, or from the habit which 
through Ufe humiliated his real titles to respect — that 
of fastening on the public favourites of the time, per- 
secuted him with praise. The prince saw a newspa- 
per panegyric on Fox, evidently from the Dr.'s pen ; 
and on being asked what he thought of it, observed, 
that " It reminded him of the famous epitaph on Ma- 
chiavel's tomb, — 

" Tanto nomini nullum Par elogium." 

If English punning be a proscribed species of wit ; 
though it bears, in fact, much more the character of 
the " chartered libertine," every w^here reprobated, 
and every where received ; yet classical puns take 
rank in all lands and languages. Burke's pun on 
the " divine right of kings and toastmasters," — the 
jure de-vino — perhaps stands at the head of its class. 
But in an argument with Jackson, the prince jest- 
ingly contended that trial by jury was as old as the 
time of Julius Caesar; and even that Caesar died 
by it. He quoted Seutonius : " Juri caesus videtur." 

The late Sir William Curtis was equally known 
for his loyalty and his good living, his speeches and 
his jovial visage ; in particular, that featme which 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 9? 

gave Bardolph his fame, was the sign of many a 
banquet, as it was the theme of a good deal of cari- 
caturing and temporary pleasantry. The prince, 
looking over one of those caricatures, representing 
Sir William, with an exaggerated nose, going to 
the siege of Walcheren, and singing a parody on 
Black-eyed Susan; remarked, that he supposed 
his old friend would succeed better as an orator 
than a poet, for — " no man cut a greater figure in 
the rostrum,''^ 

St. Leger was repeating a fragment of a striking 
speech which Grattan had delivered at the Rotunda 
^a place of popular meeting in Dublin), in his par- 
liamentary canvass. The colonel apologized for its 
want of the original eifect, which " belonged to the 
circumstances under which it had been spoken, — • 
the place, the people, the speaker himself," &c. 
" Yes," said the prince, " nothing will do for a speech 
of Grattan's but the ore Rotundo .'" 

Among the adventures to which the prince's unre- 
stricted style of life exposed him, he was once 
robbed ; not by his friends or his household, for that 
seems to have been the daily occurrence with, at 
least, the lower lanks of both ; but by those profes- 
sional collectors of the streets, who, fifty years ago, 
made a midnight walk in London as perilous as a 
walk in Arabia. The prince and the Duke of York 
had remained till a late hour at one of the St. James's 
Street clubs, where the duke had played, and, by an 
unusual fortune with that honest and open character, 
had won a considerable sum. The royal brothers 
got into a hackney-coach, and were driving down 
Hayhill, when the coach was suddenly stopped, the 
doors were thrown back, and the robbers, masked, 
presented their pistols : resistance would have been 
idle. The prince had a diamond watch of great 
value, which he cleverly slipped under the cushion. 



94 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

and tliiis saved : but the duke was obliged to refund 
all his winnings ; and the robbers were so well sa- 
tisfied with this prize, that they forgot the prince's 
purse, closed the doors, and wished them a good 
night. They had evidently been followed from the 
club-house, and, it was strongly suspected, by some 
of the gamesters themselves. On driving off, the 
prince triumphantly showed his purse. " How did 
you contrive to keep it ]" said the duke. " Easily 
enough," answered the prince, drawing his watch 
from under the cushion ; " there is nothing like hav- 
ing the watch in the coach with one." 

The leading barristers, Erskine, Adam, Ponsonby, 
Curran, Butler, and others, were frequent guests at 
the Pavilion. The society of those accomplished 
men speaks not slightly for the intellect that could 
have enjoyed their company ; and innumerable anec- 
dotes might be told of their intercourse. 

Erskine, always animated, full of conversation, 
and sportive, was then in the flower of his fame 
Led by his original propensities to take the side of 
the whigs, and personally attracted by Fox, Erskine 
had embraced party with a vividness natural to his 
character, and a sincerity new to his profession. No 
man, within memory, had so rapidly mastered the 
difficulties of rising at the bar. His singular elo- 
quence, boldness, and fervour broke down the bar- 
riers of that most jealous and repulsive of profes- 
sions ; and, from the moment of his appearing, he 
was visibly marked for the highest success : he less 
solicited popularity than was carried on its shoulders 
up to fame and fortune. The Dean of St. Asaph's 
case, the trials of Keppel, Hardy, and a succession 
of others, made him the idol at once of the people 
and the bar. By the power given to genius alone, of 
impressing its own immortality on all that it touches, 
he turned the dry details ef law into great intel- 
lectual and historic records, exalted the concerns of 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 95 

private individuals into monuments of national free- 
dom, and raised on common and temporary topici^ 
some of the richest trophies of forensic eloquence in 
any age or nation. 

Erskine, by the result of those extraordinary dis- 
plays, was a benefactor to the whole state — to the 
crown, the g-overnment, and the people. The times 
were disturbed in both the earlier and later periods 
of those great orations. In the former, the people 
were agitated by fears of the crown ; in the latter, 
the crown was made jealous by fears of the people ; 
prerogative in the one instance, and revolution in the 
other, were the terrors on both sides. The success 
of Erskine's incomparable appeals to the law showed 
the people that they had a sure defence in the last 
extremity, and thus quieted their alarms. His Qffect 
on the common sense of the people gradually quieted 
the alarms of the crown, which had been excited 
only by the dread that revolutionary principles were 
largely vitiating the national allegiance. Erskine 
proved that those principles were but on the surface, 
that the depths of the soil were of the same ancient 
and generous mould ; and that the worst evil of the 
day was but the mixture of a few weeds foreign to the 
clime, and certain to be soon extinguished and over 
grown by the native exuberance of the loyalty of 
England. 

With the common fate of lawyers, Erskine added 
nothing to his legal distinctions by his appearance in 
parliament. Locke, in his chapter on the association 
of ideas, speaks of a man who, having learned to 
dance in a chamber where his trunk lay, could never 
afterward dance where that trunk was not present 
to inspire his agility. Something of this fetter, per- 
haps, clings to all men long accustomed to effort, 
mental or bodily, in a peculiar place. The barrister, 
divested of the array of judge, jury, counsel, and 
constables, loses the sources of his oratory ; the 
props of his invention are stricken from under him ; 



96 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

the spring-wells of his fancy are dried up ; the land- 
scape, adust as it is, on which his eye fixed with the 
delight of a life of litigation, fills that eye no more. 
He is the Arab of the desert ; his hand is against 
every man, and every man's hand against his ; but 
he must have the desert for his display : and thrown 
into the " populous ways of men," the prince of 
plunderers Is strange and helpless, a fugitive or a 
mendicant. Curran, the readiest and most versatile 
of human beings, a man whom it would seem im- 
possible to embarrass by circumstances, pathetically 
declared, that " without his wig he was nothing." 
He said, that he felt not merely his barristerial phy- 
siognomy diminished, but his brains ; he acknow- 
ledged the hand of another Delilah upon him, and 
the extinction of his faculties followed the curled 
honours of his brow. When the Dublin barristers 
were compelled to appear without their wigs in court, 
from the chamber where they were kept being over- 
flowed by the river ; Curran, opening a cause, began, 
" My lord, and gentlemen of the jury, the counsel for 
the plaintiff is — what remains of me." 

But Erskine, like many characters of peculiar 
liveliness, had a morbid sensibility to the circum- 
stances of the moment, which sometimes strangely 
enfeebled his presence of mind : any appearance of 
neglect in his audience, a cough, a yawn, or a whis- 
per, even among the mixed multitude of the courts, 
and strong as he was there, has been known to dis- 
hearten him visibly. This trait was so notorious, 
that a solicitor, whose only merit was a remarkably 
vacant face, was said to be often planted opposite to 
Erskine by the a'dverse party, to yawn when the ad- 
vocate began. 

The cause of his first failure in the house was not 
unlike this curious mode of disconcerting an orator. 
He had been brought forward to support the falling 
fortunes of Fox, then struggling under the weight 
of the " coalition." The " India Bill" had heaped 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 97 

the king's almost open hostility on the accumulation 
of public wrath and grievance which the ministers 
had with such luckless industry been employed 
during the year in raising for their own ruin. Fox 
looked abroad for help; and Gordon, the member 
for Portsmouth, was displaced from his borough, and 
Erskine was brought into the house, with no slight 
triumph of his party, and perhaps some degree of 
anxiety on the opposite side. On the night of his 
first speech, Pitt, evidently intending to reply, sat 
with pen and paper in his hand, prepared to catch the 
arguments of this formidable adversary. He wrote 
a word or two ; Erskine proceeded ; but with every 
additional sentence Pitt's attention to the paper re- 
laxed ; his look became more careless ; and he obvi- 
ously began to think the orator less and less worthy 
of his attention. At length, while every eye in the 
house was fixed upon him, he, with a contemptuous 
smile, dashed the pen through the paper, and flung 
them on the floor. Erskine never recovered from 
this expression of disdain; his voice faltered, he 
struggled through the remainder of his speech, and 
sank into his seat dispirited and shorn of his fame. 

But a mind of the saliency and variety of Erskine's 
must have distinguished itself wherever it was de- 
termined on distinction ; and it is impossible to be- 
lieve, that the master of the grave, deeply-reasoned, 
and glowing eloquence of this great pleader, should 
not have been able to bring his gifts with him from 
Westminster-hall to the higher altar of parliament. 
There were times when his efforts in the house re- 
minded it of his finest efiiisions at the bar. But 
those were rare. He obviously felt that his place 
was not in the legislature ; that no man can wisely 
hope for more than one kind of eminence ; and ex- 
cept upon some party emergency, he seldom spoke, 
and probably never with much expectation of public 
effect. His later years lowered his name ; by his 
re4irement frcon active life, he lost the habits forced 

I 



98 'GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

upon him by professional and public rank ; and wan- 
dered through society, to the close of his days, a 
pleasant idler ; still the gentleman and the man of 
easy wit, but leaving society to wonder what had 
become of the great orator, in what corner of the 
brain of this perpetual punster and story-teller, this 
man of careless conduct and rambling conversation, 
had shrunk the glorious faculty, that in better days 
flashed with such force and brightness ; what cloud 
had absorbed the lightnings that had once alike pene- 
trated and illumined the heart of the British nation. 
Erskine's well-known habit of talking of himself, 
often brought the jest of the table against him. He 
was once panegyrizing his own humanity: " There," 
said he, " for instance is my dog ; I wish it to be 
happy in this life, I wish it to be happy in the other. 
Like the Indian, I wish that wherever I may go my 
faithful dog shall bear me company." "And a con- 
foundedly unlucky dog he would be," murmured Jekyll. 

All the London world was amused by Mingay's 
retort on Erskine, in one of those fits of laudation. 
The trial was on some trivial question of a patent 
for a shoe-buckle. Erskine held up the buckle to 
the jury, and harangued on " the extraordinary in- 
genuity of an invention which would have astonished 
and delighted past ages. How would my ancestors," 
said he, " have looked upon this specimen of dexte- 
rity !" From this point he started into a panegyric 
on his forefathers. Mingay was counsel for the op- 
posite side ; and concluded his speech with, — " Gen- 
tlemen, you have heard a good deal to-day of my 
learned friend's ancestors, and of their probable 
astonishment at his shoe-buckle. But, gentlemen, I 
can assure you their astonishment would have been 
quite as great at his shoes and stockings." 

The conversation at the Pavilion once turned on 
the choice of professions. After a number of qpi- 



1787.] THE PRINCE S FRIENDS. 99 

nions in favour of the church, the army, and the other 
leading pursuits, Erskine pronounced for the bar, as 
" conducting to surer public distinctions than any 
other ;" rather loftily adding, that " it was fitter for 
combining with nohle blood than any of them, the 
army excepted." The allusion was obvious ; and 
Curran, on being asked his sentiments, said, " that he 
had not the same reasons for cherishing the bar : he 
had brought to it no hereditary honours to foster ; he 
had no infusion of noble blood to pour into it ; but 
he believed as much money, and as much vexation, 
could be earned at it as in any other profession. — 
For one thing, however," he gracefully added, " I must 
feel indebted to the bar, and that is, its having raised 
me from an humble origin into the society of persons 
of the highest merit, and introduced the son of a 
peasant to the friendship of his prince." 

Curran and Erskine had frequent opportunities of 
meeting, and must have looked on each other's 
powers with respect. But this foible of the English 
barrister sometimes shook the Irishman's philosophy. 
Grattan's name was mentioned ; and Erskine casu- 
ally asked what " he said of himself." " Said of 
himself!" was Curran's astonished interjection; — 
"nothing. Grattan speak of himself! Why, sir, 
Henry Grattan is a great man ; sir, the torture could 
not wring a syllable of self-praise from Grattan, — 
a team of six horses could not drag an opinion of 
himself out of him. Like all great men, he knows 
the strength of his reputation, and will never con- 
descend to proclaim its march like the trumpeter of 
a puppet-show. — Sir, he stands on a national altar, 
and it is the business of us inferior men to keep up 
the fire and the incense. You will never see Grattan 
stooping to do either the one or the other." 

This sally may have been stimulated in some de- 
gree by one of those fits of irritability to which 
Cai.ran was liable; but no man could be more en- 



100 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

titled to tli6 praise than the speaker himself. Of 
course, every man of vigorous faculties knows his 
own powers, and knows them better than the world 
can. But no popular applause, and he was its idol, — ■ 
no homage of his profession, and he was the ac- 
knowledged meteor of the Irish bar, — and no admi- 
ration of private society, and he was the delight of 
the table, — could ever betray Curran into self-praise. 

It must be supposed, that when he was thus scru- 
pulous in his own instance, he demanded no less re- 
serve from others. When Lord Byron rose into 
fame, Curran constantly objected to his talking of 
himself, as the great drawback on his poetry. 

" Any subject," said he, " but that eternal one of 
self. I am weary of knowing once a month the 
state of any man's hopes or fears, rights or wrongs. 
I should as soon read a register of the weather, the 
barometer up so many inches to-day and down so 
many inches to-morrow. I feel skepticism all over 
me at the sight of agonies on paper, things that 
come as regular and as notorious as the full of the 
moon. The truth is, his lordship weeps for the press, 
and wipes his eyes with the public.''^ 

Curran, even when he found all the objects of his 
ambition broken up, and himself fixed in an unsuit- 
able and uncongenial office, while his whole party 
Were enjoying the rewards of political success, — fixed, 
as he characteristically said, " in a garret-window to 
see the procession go by IdcIow," — rather laughed 
at his mischance, than contrasted it with his ability. 
His services were matter of public record, and to 
those he appealed boldly : but his talents he left to 
be judged of by his countrymen, and to be replaced, 
if they could, by the ablest of a party which had 
betrayed and defrauded the most brilliant mind of 
Ireland. 

An occasional guest, and a sufficiently singular 
one, was the Irish Franciscan Arthur O'Leary; a 



1787.] THE PRINCE'S FRIENDS. 101 

man of strong faculties and considerable knowledge. 
His first celebrity was as a pamphleteer, in a long 
battle with Woodward, the able bishop of Clo)Tie, in 
Ireland, on questions of the establishment ; in which 
he generally contrived to have what a Frenchman 
would reckon as victory, les rieurs de son coU. — One 
of his retorts to the bishop's arguments against pur- 
gatory, was a recommendation, that " his lordship 
would be content to stop there; for he might go fur' 
ther and fare Tsoorse^ 

O'Leary abounded in Irish anecdote, and was a 
master of pleasant humour, rude enough, but novel 
and characteristic. His chief claim, however, was, 
that he was no unskilful medium of intercourse 
between his church and the whigs ; and contributed 
in no slight degree to the popularity of the prince in 
Ireland. 

Curran professed, that he kept up his acquaint- 
ance with O'Leary, in the hope that, as St. Francis 
occasionally holds the keys of paradise, he might let 
him in. " Better for you," was the reply, " that he 
should keep the keys of the other place, that he 
might let you out.'''' 

An officer of remarkable stature was complaining 
at the prince's table of the neglect of some memo- 
rial at the Horse Guards. O'Leary consoled him by 
observing, that " no gentleman stood higher in the 
opinion of his friends, and no man could look down 
on him, at the Horse Guards or elsewhere." 

Sheridan said, that he considered claret the true 
parliamentary wine for the peerage ; " for it might 
make a man sleepy or sick, but it never warmed his 
heart or stirred up his brains. Port, generous port, 
was for the commons ; it was for the business of 
life, it quickened the circulation and the fancy 
together. For his part, he never felt that he spoke 
I 2 



102 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

as he liked, until after a couple of bottles." O'Leary 
observed, that "this was like a porter; he coiHd 
never go steady without a load on his head." 

Another Irishman, introduced at this period to the 
prince, was a memorable instance of the power of 
accident. This was O'Beirne, afterward bishop of 
Meath, in Ireland. He had been educated at St. 
Omer's for the Roman Catholic priesthood. Re- 
turning to his college from a visit to his friends in 
Ireland, he happened to stop at the inn of some 
English village, so humble, that its whole stock of 
provisions was but one shoulder of mutton ; which 
he immediately ordered for dinner. While it was 
preparing, a post-chaise with two gentlemen stopped 
to change horses ; the roasting shoulder of mutton 
attracted their appetites ; they had travelled some 
distance, were weary, and they agreed that the next 
half-hour could not be better spent than in dining on 
what they could get. 

But a new difficulty arose, on their being told, that 
the only dinner in the house belonged to a " young 
Irish gentleman above-stairs." The travellers were 
at first perplexed; but after a little consultation, 
agreed with the landlady's idea, that the shoulder 
should be theirs ; but that, to save the credit of her 
house, the young Irishman should be invited to partake 
of it. She was despatched as ambassadress ; but 
returned, after an ineffectual attempt at persuasion, 
announcing that " the young gentleman was not to 
be softened ; but on the contrary, protested that no 
two travellers, nor any ten on earth, should deprive 
him of his dinner." This menacing message, how- 
ever, was followed by the appearance of O'Beirne 
himself, good-humouredly saying, that though he 
could not relinquish the shoulder of mutton to any- 
body, yet " if they would partake of it with him, he 
would be happy to have their company at dinner." 

The proposal was pleasantly made and pleasantly 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 105 

accepted. The party sat down ; the bottle went 
round; none of the three was deficient in topics; 
and before the evening- closed, the travellers were 
so much struck with the appearance and manners 
of their entertainer, then a very handsome young 
man, and always a very quick, anecdotical, and intel- 
ligent one, tliat they asked him, " What he meant to 
do with himself in the world ?" His destination 
for the Irish priesthood was immediately set down 
as altogether inferior to the prospects which might 
lie before his abilities in English life. On parting, 
the travellers gave him their cards, and desired him 
to call on them on his arrival in London. We msLy 
judge of his surprise, when he found that his guests 
were no less personages than Charles Fox and the 
Duke of Portland ! 

Such an invitation was not likely to be declined. 
His two distinguished friends kept their promise 
honourably; and in a short period O'Beirne enjoyed 
all the advantages of the first society of the empire. 
What his graceful appearance and manners gained 
in the first instance, was kept by his literary acquire- 
ments and the usefulness of his services. He was 
for a considerable period on a confidential footing 
in the Duke of Portland's household, and much em- 
ployed hi the party negotiations of the time. Among 
his lighter labours were two dramas, from the 
French, which he assisted the Dutchess of Devon- 
shire in translating and adapting for the stage ; and 
of whose failure, for they seem to have been blown 
away by a tornado of criticism, the assistant gal- 
lantly bore the blame. But O'Beirne had now 
securely fastened himself on prosperity, and " nei- 
ther domestic treason nor foreign levy," neither the 
check of a negotiation nor the overthrow of a drama, 
could uproot him. On Howe's conciliatory mission 
to America, O'Beirne was sent with him as chaplain, 
and in some measure as secretary. The mission 
•was flung into utter scorn by the Americans, as 



104 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

every one predicted that it would be ; but the chap- 
lain preached a famous sermon at New- York, and 
brought home the only laurels of the embassy. 

On Lord Fitzwilliam's fatal appointment to the 
viceroyalty of Ireland, O'Beirne accompanied him as 
chaplain and private secretary, and with the usual 
promise of the first diocess. The viceroyalty lasted 
but six months; yet six months which were long 
enough to lay the foundations of the rebellion. The 
alternate feebleness and violence of this brief go- 
vernment, of whose results the noble viceroy was pro- 
bably as unconscious as the babe unborn, made the 
change one of imperious necessity. Yet O'Beirne 
escaped from the wreck ; floated where all was going 
down round him; and had scarcely reappeared in 
London, when he was raised to. the peerage, and the 
opulent bishopric of Meath, valued at 8000/. a-year. 

Whether this accession of rank and wealth added 
equally to his happiness, is a graver question. It 
may well be presumed that they were not gained 
without envy, nor, at such a time, held without at- 
tack. His change of religion, though at an early pe- 
riod of life, and on conviction, was not forgotten by 
his fellow-students at St. Omer's, who were now 
scattered through Ireland as priests. His political 
connexions were at an end ; their debt had been paid ; 
and except a solitary letter from the Duke of Port- 
land, his English intercourse was closed. The party 
fiercenesses of Ireland are always bitter in the degree 
of their unimportance; their patriotism tears the 
country with the passion and the impotence of chil- 
dren. And to this worthless and nameless strife was 
a man relegated, who had spent the flower of his 
days in the first society of England, among women, 
the "cynosures" of elegance and fashion ; in constant 
intercourse with men of first-rate ability and nationa;l 
influence ; and in the centre and living glare of those 
great transactions which moved all Europe, and 
which will shape its history for ages to come. 



17S7.] THE prince's friends. 105 

The restlessness natural to such a life, rather than 
the necessity for reform, urged him to a hasty re- 
form in his diocess. But there is no operation more 
delicate, under any circumstances ; and no reliance 
on the value of his intentions could shield their prac- 
tice from long- and bitter animadversion. He died a 
few years ago; after a career which might have 
made an instructive and curious biography, and no 
bad manual of " the art of rising in the world." 

Those statements are given from public rumour ; 
but the fact that O'Beirne was the extinguisher of the 
"commercial propositions," so well known in the 
history of the Irish legislature, in 1785, rests on 
higher authority. — Ministers, for the purpose of equal- 
izing the system of trade, and diminishing the re- 
strictions on the commerce between England and Ire- 
land had transmitted a series of resolutions to the 
Irish viceroy, the Duke of Rutland; whose chief se- 
cretary, Mr. Orde, was the instrument of bringing 
them forward in the house. The measures were ad- 
vantageous ; for, in Grattan's language, who favoured 
them on their introduction, " They put an end to 
debt, they established Irish economy, and they made 
the British minister a guarantee to the integrity of 
the house of commons and the economy of the 
Irish governmemt." The address was carried unani- 
mously. 

O'Beirne was at that period occupied in writing 
on commercial subjects ; and a pamphlet, in which he 
examined the " propositions," threw so strong a light 
on their disadvantages to the trade of some of the 
outports, that ministers began to be startled at their 
own measure. The propositions were accordingly 
returned to Ireland modified. But the Irish oppo- 
nents of government had now found a theme, and 
they made unsparing use of it. Flood, a man of 
great natural powers, highly cultivated, and who 
" wielded the fierce democracy without a rival," until 



106 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787 

the spirit of Mammon came over him, and in an un- 
deserved pension he buried his fame and his facul- 
ties together, was vehement in his reprobation of 
the measure. He charged it with overthrowing the 
independence of Ireland. " The British parliament 
has declared," said he, "that the laws of British 
commerce shall be adopted in Ireland. There is but 
one thing more for the British parliament to declare, 
— that there shall be a slave-trade in Ireland ! The 
freedom of our constitution is necessary to support 
the freedom of our trade. But if a parliament 
could be so profligate^ so base as to attempt that 
liberty — (here Fitzgibbon, afterward Lord Clare, the 
chief organ of the Irish government, contemptuously 
cheered.) " I ask j/ow," exclaimed Flood, raising his 
tone, " may it not be attempted 1 But my voice shall 
be heard at the extremities of the land. My head 
and my heart are independent. My fortune is inde- 
pendent of prince or people. I am content to be a 
felloe-subject with my countrymen ; but I will not 
be their fellow-slave. That man shall not descend to 
the grave i7i peace who would destroy the freedom of 
my country." 

The menace was characteristic, and perfectly in- 
telligible ; but nothing could fall lighter on Fitzgib- 
bon, who was as fearless in the field as he was haughty 
in the cabinet, insolent in the house, and tyrannical 
every where else ; and who, being a good swords- 
man and a capital shot, was in all points a first-rate 
Irish attorney-general. 

But if Flood lashed the contrivers of the measure, 
Grattan thundered and lightened on the measure 
itself. " Contemplate for a moment," exclaimed this 
nervous orator, "the powers this bill piesumes to 
perpetuate; — a perpetual repeal of trial by jury; a 
perpetual repeal of the great charter; a perpetual 
writ of assistance; a perpetual felony to strike an 
exciseman. 

'* The late Chief-Baron Burgh, speaking on* the 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 107 

revenue bill, justly said, ' You give to the dipping 
rule what you should deny to the sceptre.' 

W * w 'it ^ W 

" Could the parliament of England covenant to 
subscribe your laws 1 Could she covenant that 
young Ireland should command, and that old Eng- 
land should obey ? If such a proposal to England 
were treachery, in Ireland it cannot be constitution. 
I rest on the authority on which the revolution rests. 
Locke says, in his chapter on the Abolition of Go- 
vernment, that ' The transfer of legislative power is 
the abolition of the state, not a transfer.' 

" Thus I congratulate this house and myself, that 
it is one of the blessings of the British constitution, 
that it cannot perish of rapid mortality, — not die in 
a day, like the men who should protect her. Any 
act which would destroy the liberty of the people is 
dead-born from the womb. Men may put down the 
public cause for a season ; but another year will see 
the good institution of parliament shaking oflf the 
tomb, to reascend in all its pomp and plenitude." 

Grattan then turned to the prohibitions, and smote 
them in a memorable passage. — "See now, what 
you obtain by compensation. A covenant not to 
trade beyond the Cape of Good Hope or the Straits 
of Magellan ! This is not a surrender of the politi- 
cal rights of the constitution, but of the natural 
rights of man, — not of the privileges of parlia- 
ment, but of the rights of nations : not to sail beyond 
the Cape of Good Hope or the Straits of Magellan, 
an awful interdict ! Not only European settlements, 
but neutral countries excluded ; and God's providence 
shut out in the most opulent boundaries of creation ! 
Other interdicts go to particular places, for local rea- 
sons, because they belong to certam European 
states ; but here are neutral regions forbidden, and a 
path prescribed to the Irishman in the open sea. 
Other interdicts go to a determinate period of time ; 
but here is an eternity of restraint ! You are to have 



108 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

no trade at all during- the existence of any company ; 
and no free trade to those countries after its expira- 
tion. This resembles rather a judgment of God than 
an act of the legislature, whether you measure it by 
immensity of space or infinity of duration, and has 
nothing human about it hut its presumption.'^'' 

It has been the habit of late years to scoff at Irish 
eloquence ; but let the scoffers produce among them- 
selves the equal of this passage, or of a thousand 
others that still live in the records of the fallen par- 
liament of Ireland. The meager and affected style 
which has at length so universally pervaded the de- 
partments of public speaking — ^parliament, bar, and 
pulpit — shrinks with natural jealousy from the mag- 
nificence and native power of this great faculty of 
appeal to the understandings of all men alike ; whose 
excellence was, that, at once enriched and invigo- 
rated by the noblest imagination, it awoke the reason 
not less than the feelings ; and even in its most fan- 
tastic decoration, lost nothing of its original strength. 
It was ornamented ; but its force was no more sacri- 
ficed to its ornament, than the solid steel of the 
Greek helmet to its plumage and sculptures. Grat- 
tan and Curran in Ireland, Sheridan and Burke 
in this country, were among the most logical of 
speakers ; their finest illustrations were only more 
powerful arguments. The gold and jewels of that 
sceptre which they waved over the legislature with 
such undisputed supremacy, only increased the 
weight and substantial value of the emblem. 

The obnoxious resolutions were withdrawn, and 
the house was in an uproar of applause. Curran 
finished a speech, full of every attribute of oratory, 
with a fine peroration. 

" The bill is at an end. The cloud that had been col- 
lecting so long, and threatening to break in tempest 
and ruin on our heads, has passed harmlessly away. 
The siege that was drawn round the constitution 
is raised, and the enemy are gone : Juvat ire et Do- 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 109 

rica castra. We may now go abroad without fear, 
and trace the dangers from which we have escaped. 
Here was drawn the line of circumvallation that cut 
us off for ever from the eastern world, and there the 
corresponding one that enclosed us from the west." 
The orator now adverted to the principal members 
who had contributed to the defeat of the measure, 
in a few words, which, from their locality, produced 
an electric effect on the whole eager assemblage. 

" Here," said he, pointing to Mr. Conolly, a coun- 
try gentleman of great public influence, and brother- 
in-law to the Duke of Leinster, "Here stood the trusty 
mariner on his old station, the mast-head, and gave 
the signal. Here stood Mr. Flood, the collected 
wisdom of the state, explaining your weakness and 
your strength, detecting every ambuscade, and point- 
ing to the masked battery that was brought to bear 
on the shrine of freedom ; and here, Mr. Grattan was 
exerting an eloquence almost more than hitman ; in- 
spiring, forming, directing, animating to the great 
purposes of your salvation." 

The introduction of a doubt of the legislative inde- 
pendence of Ireland into one of the resolutions, had 
produced the result of overthrowing the whole. 
Whether this were accident, or (as is more probable) 
cabinet dexterity, the purpose of the English govern- 
ment was answered. It was even more than an- 
swered ; for the withdrawal of the resolutions raised 
the popularity of the minister in Ireland. Thus the 
parliament exulted in the Hibernian triumph of gain- 
ing a loss ; and the English administration were 
relieved from the burden of a measure which might 
have deeply shaken their popularity at home. But 
the inspirer of this piece of imwilling wisdom was 
O'Beirne. 

There was still a little appendix to the debate ; 
for Fitzgibbon having said, with his usual inso- 
lence, " that if Ireland sought to quarrel with Great 
Britain, she was a besotted nation ; and that Great 

K 



110 GEORGE THE FOtJRTH. [1787. 

Britain was not easily roused nor easily appeased :*' 
adding the still more offensive remark, " that Ireland 
was easily roused, and easily appeased ;" this extra- 
official taunt raised a storm of indignation. The 
whole opposition demanded an apology ; which was 
tardily made by Fitzgibbon's proud heart, in the 
shape of an explanation. But Curran was not to 
be so pacified. He had been bruised by the attor- 
ney-general's official superiority in the courts, and he 
took a fierce delight in inflicting vengeance on him 
where his precedency went for nothing. He now 
pounced upon the oppressor, tore his character in 
pieces, and declared that — " the libel which he had 
so contumeliously ventured to fix on Ireland, was in 
his own person a truth ; that he was easily roused and 
easily put down.'''' The result was a duel ; in which 
the parties fired without effect. But the hatred did 
not pass away with the rencounter. Fitzgibbon, on 
leaving t^ie ground, said, with unchivalric bitterness, 
" Well, Mr. Curran, you have escaped for this time." 
Curran retorted with severer pungency — " If I did, 
it was no fault of yours, sir ; you took aim enough.'''' 

The hostility continued through life, in the house 
and out of the house. Fitzgibbon rose to the summit 
of his profession, and was, in a few years after, 
Lord Chancellor. But he had not the magnanimity 
to forget in the chancellor what he had suffered in 
the lower grades of office. The " king did not for- 
give the injuries of the Duke of Orleans ;" power 
seemed only to reinforce his hostility ; and Curran 
constantly charged him with labouring to crush, by 
the weight of the bench, the antagonist whom he 
could not overcome by his talents. But never man 
less consulted his own ease, than the chancellor by 
this perversion of authority. His adversary was not 
to be extinguished ; the contest only roused him into 
the keener exertion of his gTcat abilities. On all 
occasions Curran smote or stung him ; and the 
whole annals of vindictive oratory probably con- 



1787.] THE PRINCES FRIENDS. Ill 

tain nothing more excoriating, more utterly tear- 
ing off the skin, and steeping the nak'^^d nerve in 
poison, than Curran's celebrated invective on Lord 
Clare, in his speech before the privy council of 
Ireland. 

The prince was fond of manly sports ; and cricket 
was often played in the lawn before the Pavilion, and 
the dinner which followed was served in a markee. 
On one of those occasions, the Duke of York and 
Sheridan fell into dispute on some point of the game. 
The day was " a burning day in the month of Sep- 
tember," the wine had gone round rapidly, and the 
disputants, who had heated themselves with play, and 
were both at all times easily affected by wine, began 
to attract the notice of the table. Sheridan at length 
angrily told the duke, " that he was not be talked out 
of his opinion there or any where else, and that at play 
all men were on a par." The blood of the Bruns- 
wicks flamed, and the duke was evidently about to 
make some peculiarly indignant reply; when the 
prince stood up, and addressed them both. 

The narrator of the circumstance, a person of rank, 
who was present, himself one of the most attractive 
public speakers of the day, has often declared, that 
he never, on any occasion, saw an individual sud- 
denly called on acquit himself with more ability. 
The speech was of some lengtli, ten or fifteen 
minutes ; it was alternately playful and grave, ex- 
pressed with perfect self-possession, and touching on 
the occurrences of the game, the characters of both 
disputants, and the conversation at the table, with 
the happiest delicacy and dexterity. The prince 
made a laughing apology for Sheridan's unlucky 
use of the phrase, " on a par," by bidding his bro- 
ther remember, that the impressions of school were 
not easily effaced, that Dr. Parr had iri/licted leam' 
ing upon Sheridan, and that, like the lover in the 
" Wonder," who mixes his mistress' name with 



112 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

every thing, and calls to his valet, " roast me these 
Violantes ;" the name of Parr was uppermost in She- 
ridan's sleep : he then ran into a succession of sport- 
ive quotations of the word par, in the style of — " Lu- 
dere par impar, equitare in arundine longd ;" until the 
speech was concluded in general gayety, and the dis- 
pute was thought of no more. 

Biography has, at least, not flattered Sheridan. 
Some of the writers of his life have evidently thought, 
the more libel the more truth ; and even his ablest 
biographer has suffered the clouds on Sheridan's 
moral character to spread to his intellectual. 

But where, in the whole compass of literature, 
shall we look for wit equal, not merely to what 
might be collected from the mass of Sheridan's dra- 
matic efforts, but to that of any one of them. Con- 
greve is the only dramatist who approaches him in 
variousnes« and grace of dialogue. But in wit, in 
the power of condensing and refining language until 
it sparkles, those alone who read Congreve with a 
view to the comparison can conceive his inferiority. 
There is, probably, more of the essence of wit in a 
single scene of the " School for Scandal" than in 
all that Congreve ever wrote. The facility and 
playfulness of Vanbrugh's dialogue were often 
praised by Sheridan, as a model for the stage. But 
Vanbrugh is content with humour, seldom aims at 
wit, and still seldomer reaches his aim. If we are 
to be told that Sheridan often covered the margin of 
his paper with facetiae, reserved to be used on fur- 
ther occasion ; what is this, more than the evidence 
that his fancy teemed faster than he required its off- 
spring, that his vein was redundant, and that he de- 
posited on the margin of his manuscript the thoughts 
which he could not crowd into his already crowded 
dialogue "? The true test of the rarity and vigour 
of his talent is, how much has it done — how immea.* 
Burably has it distanced all rivalship in its time— 



1787.] THE prince's friends. il3 

how dim is the prospect of a successor ; and with 
what native and perpetual enjoyment, the public, 
after the lapse of half a century, still look upon 
the polished and attic structure of the " School for 
Scandal." 

Unhappily, this opinion must be limited to its wit. 
The moral, the characters, and the plot belonged 
to a state of public manners which no man of deco- 
rous feelings can desire to see revived. Sheridan's 
life furnished only one more of the melancholy 
instances of talent rendered useless, and great op- 
portunities turned into shame and suffering, by the 
want of qualities, higher than wit, and crowning the 
head of man with honours more enduring than the 
wreaths of genius. But let justice be done ; let 
him have upon his tomb the prize for which he toiled, 
and for which, neither living nor dead, has he found 
a competitor. 

But it will be fully allowed, that Sheridan, of whom 
it was said that " he never kept a receipt nor a key," 
was as careless in the abandonment or the appropria- 
tion of wit, as of money. His seizure of the quaint 
expression of Sir Philip Francis on the unlucky 
peace of Amiens, — " This is a peace which every 
one will be pleased with, but no one will be proud 
of," — is well known ; though perhaps the winding up 
of the anecdote is not equally public. — Sir Philip, on 
learning Sheridan's use of his apothegm, looked 
upon himself as not a little injured, and said, " Ay, 
that is the way with the whigs ; those fellows suck 
me." Sheridan's reported answer was, " You may 
tell Sir Philip that I, for one, am weaned long ago ; 
but I think he would m-ake an excellent dry-nurse " 

Sheridan's ruin was ambition ; and the ruin began 
at his first step into life. He launched into an expen- 
diture beyond his means ; coped with men of ten 
times his fortune, for the first year ; and before it was 
over, was in debt for the rest of his days. His care- 
lessness was systematic ; for he openly profesv'ed, 

K2 



114 GEORGE THE FOrRTH. [1787 

as his maxim, that " debt, though an inconvenience, 
was no disgrace." The next rock on which his 
fatal ambition drove him was parliament. By 
attempting to combine the two characters of stage 
proprietor and statesman, he lost the advantages of 
both ; the emoluments of the stage vanished from 
the touch of a man whose soul was in the struggles 
of party ; while the substantial honours of public 
life were hopeless to one hourly perplexed by the 
task of stage management, and perpetually driven to 
extremity by the shattered finances of his theatre. 
By adopting the firm resolution to abandon either 
career, he might have made himself opulent and 
eminent in the other : for such were the superabun 
dant powers of his mind, that nothing but a steady 
determination was wanting, to have given him emi- 
nence in any pursuit within the reach of genius. 

Yet few men could plead such excuses for parlia- 
mentary ambition. Of all the great speakers of a 
day fertile in oratory, Sheridan had the most con- 
spicuous natural gifts. His figure, at his first intro- 
duction into the house, was manly and striking ; his 
countenance singularly expressive, when excited by 
debate ; his eye large, black, and intellectual ; and 
his voice one of the richest, most flexible, and most 
sonorous, that ever came from human lips. Pitt's 
was powerful, but monotonous ; and its measured 
tone often wearied the ear. Fox's was all confusion 
in the commencement of his speech ; and it required 
some tension of ear throughout to catch his words. 
Burke's was loud and bold, but unmusical ; and his 
contempt for order in his sentences, and the abrupt- 
ness of his grand and swelling conceptions, that 
seemed to roll through his mind like billows before 
a gale, often made the defects of his delivery more 
striking. But Sheridan, in manner, gesture, and 
voice, had every quality that could give effect to 
eloquence. 

Pitt and Fox were listened to With profound re- 



1787.] THE PRINCES FRIENDS. 115 

spect, and in silence, broken only by occasional 
cheers ; but from the moment of Sheridan's rismg-, 
there was an expectation of pleasure, wMch to his 
last days was seldom disappointed. A low murmur 
of eagerness ran round the house ; every word was 
watched for, and his first pleasantry set the whole 
assemblage on a roar. Sheridan was aware of this ; 
and has been heard to say, " that if a jester would 
never be an orator, yet no speaker could expect to 
be popular in a full house, without a jest ; and that 
he always made the experiment, good or bad ; as a 
laugh gave him the country gentlemen to a man." 

It is a remarkable instance of the advantages of 
time and place to an orator, that his speeches on 
Hastings's trial, which were once the wonder of the 
nation, and which Pitt, Fox, and Burke loaded with 
emulous panegyric, are now scarcely reckoned among 
his fortunate efforts. With the largest allowance for 
party or policy, it is impossible to doubt that the 
utterers of the panegyric were to a great extent sin- 
cere ; or that the nation at large hailed those 
speeches as the most consummate work, the twelfth 
labour, of modern eloquence. Yet Sheridan's total 
carelessness, if not cautious suppression, of them, 
shows that his sagacity was perfectly awake to theii 
true value ; and the remnants which have come 
down to us appear memorable for nothing but their 
success in bewildering the senatorial understanding, 
and deluding the national sense of justice. 

But in the house he was always formidable ; and 
though Pitt's moral or physical courage never shrank 
from man, yet Sheridan was the antagonist with 
whom he evidently least desired to come into colli- 
sion, and with whom the collision, when it did occur, 
was of the most fretful nature. Pitt's sarcasm on 
him as a theatrical manager, and Sheridan's severe 
yet fully justified retort, are too well known to be 
now repeated ; but there were a thousand instances 
of that " keen encounter of their wits," in which 
person was more involved than party. 



116 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

" I leave," said Pitt, at the conclusion of an attack 
of this kind; "I leave the honourable gentleman 
what he likes so well, the woman's privilege — the 
last word." Sheridan started up : "I am perfectly 
sensible," said he, "of the favour which the right 
honourable gentleman means, in offering me a privi- 
lege so peculiarly adapted to himself ; but I must beg 
leave to decline the gift. I have no wish for the last 
word; I am content with having the last argumenW^ 

But he sometimes aimed a more sweeping blow, 
and assailed the minister with his whole power. In 
a speech on the suspension of the habeas corpus act, 
in the disturbances of 1795, after detailing the 
sources of the populai irritability, he drew Pitt's por- 
trait to his face ; of course, in the overcharged CO7 
lours of a political enemy, but with great keenness 
and dexterity of exaggeration. 

" I can suppose the case," said he, " of a haughty 
and stiff-necked minister, who never mixed in a po- 
pular assembly, and who had therefore no common 
feeling with the people, no knowledge of the mode 
«in which their intercourse is conducted ; who was 
not a month in the ranks of this house before he was 
raised to the first situation ; and though on a footing 
with any other member, was elevated with the idea 
of a fancied superiority. Such a minister can have 
no communication with the people of England but 
through the medium of spies and informers ; he is 
unacquainted with the mode in which their senti- 
ments are expressed ; he cannot make allowance for 
the language of toasts and resolutions adopted in 
the convivial hour. Such a minister, if he lose 
their confidence will bribe their hate ; if he disgust 
ihem by arbitrary measures, he will not leave them 
till they are completely bound and shackled ; above 
all, he will gratify the vindictive spirit of apostacy, 
by prosecuting all who dare to espouse the cause 
which he has betrayed ; and he will not desist, till 
he has buried in one grave, the peace, the glory, and 
the independence of England." 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 117 

But the effect of those vehement appeals was sin- 
gularly heightened by the orator's facility of turning 
at once from the severe to the ludicrous, and by the 
flashings of his wit giving force and distinctness to 
his deepest-toned pictures of national calamity. In 
allusion to the state trials of 1794, he contemptuously 
said, " that he never pretended to preternatural va- 
lour, and that, having but one neck to lose, he should 
be as sorry to find his undergoing the operation of 
the lamp-post, as any honourable gentleman in that 
house ; but that he must confess he felt himself con- 
siderably cheered by the discovery that the danger 
existed all within the vision of the treasury bench. 
He could not help thinking, with the chief-justice, 
that it was much in favour of the accused, that they 
had neither men, money, nor zeal.^^ 

He then ridiculed the fears of government. "I 
own," said he, "that there was something in the 
case, quite enough to disturb the virtuous sensibilities 
and loyal terrors of the right honourable gentleman. 
But so hardened is this side of the house, that our 
fears did not much disturb us. On the first trial one 
pike was produced. That was, however, withdrawn. 
Then a terrific instrument was talked of, for the an- 
nihilation of his majesty's cavalry ; it appeared, upon 
evidence, to be a tetotum in a window in Sheffield. But 
I had forgot, there was also a camp in a back shop , 
an arsenal provided with nine muskets ; and an ex- 
chequer containing the same number oj' pounds, ex- 
actly nine, no, let me be accurate, it was nine pounds 
and one bad shilling. 

On the rumours of the Scottish conspiracy, — 
" There is now," exclaimed he, " but one way of wis- 
dom and loyalty, and that is panic. The man who is 
not panic-struck is to be incapable of common sense. 
My honourable friend (Windham) has acquired this 
new faculty, and has been a sage on the new plan 
above a week old. Another friend (Burke) was in- 
spired in the same fortunate manner. He has been 



118 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

SO powerfully affected, that he saw in the sky nothing* 
but cloud, on the earth nothing but a bleak opposi- 
tion, where there was not a politic bush or a shrub 
\o shelter him from the coming tempest. But he 
has luckily taken refuge in the ministerial gabardine, 
where, I hope, he may find security from the storm." 
— " The alarm had been brought in with great pomp 
and circumstance on a Saturday morning. At night, 
the Duke of Richmond stationed himself, among 
other curiosities, at the Tower! and a great munici- 
pal officer, the lord mayor, made a discovery m the 
east. He had found out that there was in Cornhill 
a debating society, where people went to buy treason 
at sixpence a-head: where it was retailed to them 
by inch of candle ; and five minutes, measured by 
the glass, were allowed to each traitor to perform 
his part in overturning the state. — In Edinburgh an 
insurrection was planned ; the soldiers were to be 
corrupted; and this turned out to be — by giving six- 
pence for porter. Now, what the scarcity of money 
may be in that country I cannot tell, but it does not 
strike me that the system of corruption had been 
carried to any great extent. Then, numbers were 
kept in pay, they were drilled in dark rooms by a 
sergeant in a brown coat, and on a given signal they 
were to sally from the back parlour and overturn the 
constitution." 

His quotations from the classics were often happy. 
The allusion to the motto of the Sun newspaper, 
which had been commenced under ministerial patron- 
age, was universally cheered. — " There was one pa- 
per in particular, said to be the property of members • 
of that house, which had for its motto a garbled part 
of a beautiful sentence, when it might, with much 
more propriety, have assumed the whole : 

" Solem quis dicere fklsum 
^udeat ? Ille etiam caecos instare tumultus 
6spe monet, fraudemque et operta tmnescere bella.** 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 119 

The prince, himself remarkable for his dexterity 
in telling a story, was fond of collecting instances 
of the whim and humour of the Irish peasantry- 
One of those was — the history of Morgan Prussia. - 

Morgan, the gay and handsome son of a low Irish 
farmer, tired of home, went to take the chances of 
the world, and seek his fortune. By what means he 
traversed England, or made his way to France, is 
not told. But he at length crossed France also, and, 
probably without much knowledge or much care 
whether he were moving to the north or the south 
pole, found himself in the Prussian territory. This 
was in the day of the first Frederic, famous for his 
tall regiment of guards, and for nothing else ; ex- 
cept his being the most dangerous compound of fool 
and madman among the crowned heads of the Con- 
tinent. He had but one ambition, that of inspecting 
twice a-day a regiment of a thousand grenadiers, not 
one of whom was less than six feet and a half high. 
Morgan was an Irish giant, and was instantly seized 
by the Prussian recruiting sergeants, yvYio forced him 
to volunteer into the tall battalion. This turn of fate 
was totally out of the Irishman's calculation ; and 
the prospect of carrying a musket till his dying day 
on the Potsdam parade, after having made up his 
mind to live by his wits, and rove the world, more 
than once tempted him to think of leaving his mus- 
ket and his honour behind him, and fairly trying his 
chance for escape. But the attempt was, always 
found impracticable; the frontier was too closely 
watched, and Morgan still marched up and down the 
Potsdam parade with a disconsolate heart; when 
one evening a Turkish recruit was brought in : for 
Frederic looked to nothing but the thews and sinews 
of a man, and the Turk was full seven feet high. 

" How much did his majesty give for catching that 
heathen V said Morgan to his corporal. " Four hun- 
dred dollars," was the answei. He burst out into an 
exclamation of astonishment at this waste of royal 



120 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

treasure upon a Turk. " Why, they cannot be got 
for less," replied the corporal. " What a pity my 
five brothers cannot hear of it !" said Morgan, " I am 
a dwarf to any one of them, and the sound of half 
the money would bring them all over immediately." 
As the discovery of a tall recruit was the well-known 
road to favouritism, five were worth at least a paii 
of colours to the corporal ; the conversation was im- 
mediately carried to the sergeant, and from him 
through the gradation of officers to the colonel, 
who took the first opportunity of mentioning it to 
the king. The colonel was instantly ordered to 
question Morgan. But he at once had lost all me- 
mory on the subject. — " He had no brothers ; he had 
made the regiment his father and mother and rela- 
tions, and there he hoped to live and die." But he 
was urged still more strongly, and at length con- 
fessed, that he had brothers, even above the regi- 
mental standard, but that " nothing on earth could 
stir them from their spades." 

After some time, the king inquired for the five re- 
cruits, and was indignant when he was told of the 
impossibility of enlisting them. " Send the fellow 
himself," he exclaimed, "and let him bring them 
back." The order was given, but Morgan was 
" broken hearted at the idea of so long an absence 
from the regiment." He applied to the colonel to 
have the order revoked, or at least given to some one 
else. But this was out of the question, for Frede- 
ric's word was always irrevocable ; and Morgan, with 
a disconsolate face, prepared to set out upon his mis- 
sion. But a new difficulty struck him. " How was 
he to make his brothers come, unless he showed 
them the recruiting money '?" This objection was at 
last obviated by the advance of a sum equal to about 
three hundred pounds sterling, as a first instalment 
for the purchase of his family. Like a loyal grena- 
dier, the Irishman was now ready to attempt anything 

r his colonel or his king, and Morgan began hia 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 121 

journey. But, as he was stepping out of the gates 
of Pot3dam, another difficulty occurred; and he 
returned to tell the colonel, that of all people exist- 
ing, the Irish were the most apt to doubt a traveller's 
story, they being in the habit of a good deal of exer- 
cise in that style themselves ; and that, when he 
should go back to his own country and tell them of 
the capital treatment and sure promotion that a soldier 
met with in the guards, the probability was, that they 
would laugh in his face. As to the money, " there 
were some who would not scruple to say that he stole 
it, or tricked some one out of it. But, undoubtedly 
when they saw him walking back only as a common 
soldier, he was sure that they would not believe a 
syllable, let him say what he would, about rising in 
the service." 

The objection was intelligible enough, and the 
colonel represented it to Frederic, who, doubly 
outrageous at the delay, swore a grenadier oath, 
ordered Morgan to be made a sous q^cier, or upper 
sergeant, and, with a sword and epaulette, sent him 
instantly across the Rhine to convince his five bro- 
thers of the rapidity of Prussian promotion. Mor- 
gan flew to his home in the County Carlow, de- 
lighted the firesides for many a mile round with 
his having outwitted a king and a whole battalion 
of grenadiers, laid out his recruiting money on land, 
and became a man of estate at the expense of the 
Prussian treasury. 

One ceremony remains to be recorded. Once a 
year, on the anniversary of the day in which he left 
Potsdam and its giants behind, he climbed a hill 
within a short distance of his house, turned him- 
self in the direction of Prussia, and, with the 
most contemptuous gesture which he could con- 
trive, bade good-by to his majesty ! The ruse was 
long a great source of amusement, and its hero, like 
other heroes, bore through life the name earned by 
his exploit, Morgan Prussia. 

L 



122 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

Burke was among the earliest friends of the 
prince ; and his admirable talents, sincere honesty, 
and inexhaustible zeal in whatever cause he under- 
took, made him one of the most valuable advocates 
and advisers that his royal highness could have 
found in the empire. No individual in the me- 
mory of the house, had risen to such sudden fame 
as Burke ; if the difficulties of his first years are 
taken into consideration. Pitt's youth was sus- 
tained by his hereditary renown, at a time when 
to be the son of Chatham was a passport to .all 
honours. His early official rank also gave an ex- 
traordinary weight to his authority as a speaker ; 
and when the house listened at once to eloquent 
language and the sentiments of the first minister 
of the crown, the impression was complete. 

Fox had the same advantage of hereditary renown ; 
for, if Lord Holland was an inferior orator to Chat- 
ham, he still was a speaker of distinguished acute- 
ness, force, and knowledge, and the most daring and 
able antagonist of that great man which the house 
had witnessed. 

Fox, too, as the head of opposition, had a species 
of official weight, scarcely less than that of the mi- 
nister. He was the oracle of a party which might, 
within twenty-four hours, be masters of the govern- 
ment ; and the most common declaration from the 
lips of the leader must be received with the atten- 
tion due to the public will of the aristocracy of Eng- 
land. 

But Burke had nothing to depend upon but him- 
self; he possessed none of the powerful levers of 
English birth and connexion, to raise him above the 
natural obstacles that in all lands obstruct the stran- 
ger. Of all helpless beings, an Irishman cast loose 
into the streets of London, at that day, was the most 
helpless. The Scotchman clung to some lucky emi- 
grant from the north colonized in the fat fertihty of 
London ; or found protection in his national name, 



1787.] THE PRINCE'S FRIENDS. 123 

and patiently worked his passage to fortune. But 
the Irishman landed in the metropolis, as if he landed 
on the shores of Africa; he was on terra Jirma, 
but no more — the earth produced no fruits to him ; 
the landscape showed him nothing hut a desert ; and 
it was a piece of no common good fortune, if his first 
fraternal embrace were not from a brotherhood of 
banditti, and his final residence were not in a dun- 
geon. 

At this period but little intercourse subsisted be- 
tween the two countries. They talked of each other 
as if half the world lay between. To England, Ire- 
land was what Sicily was to the Greek — a land of 
monsters and marvels, of rebellious giants and des- 
perate hazards, that made the sleek skin of England 
quiver to its extremities. To Ireland, England was 
a place of inordinate prejudice and eternal gloom ; 
memorable only for license at home and ambition 
abroad; lavishing her vindictiveness on Ireland in 
perpetual visitations of super-subtle secretaries and 
dull viceroys ; in unintelligible acts of parliament, and 
taxes without mercy and without end ; yet, never- 
theless, having certain paths knee-deep in gold-dust 
for the gallant adventurers who were bold enough to 
run the chance of being starved or hanged in the dis- 
covery. 

The romance on both sides has been much cooled 
by time and knowledge. England is no more the El 
Dorado, nor Ireland the Cyclops' cave : the peaceful 
annual importations of her ten thousand paupers and 
her hundred representatives, show the generosity 
with which the sister-comitry can part with her popu- 
lation for the sake of the empire ; arid the zeal with 
which the importation of both is welcomed here 
shows that England is not to be outdone in the mag- 
nanimous virtues. 

Burke had scarcely entered the house when he 
irevv all eyes upon him. He was marked out for 
eminence, from his first speech. " A young Irishman 



124 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787. 

has just appeared here, who astonishes everybody by 
his information and eloquence," was Fitzpatrick's 
account of him to his correspondent in Ireland. 

Parliament was Sheridan's undoing ; for it excited 
his vanity, already too headstrong; prevented him 
from making any rational effort to restore his for- 
tune, already falling into decay ; and by its tempta- 
tions alike to the peculiar species of indolence and 
the peculiar species of exertion which Sheridan most 
unwisely loved, led him from one evil to another, 
until his fate was decided. 

To Sheridan, parliament, in its best day, was but a 
larger club, where he found a ready entertainment, 
an easy fame, irregular hours, and a showy, amusing, 
and various society, always willing to receive his 
jest, and to repay it with applause. ' Thus he flut- 
tered through life, as the moth round the candle, con- 
tinually wheeling closer to ruin ; until his flight was 
scorched at last, and he dropped, like the insect, 
withered and wingless, to wyithe on the ground in 
misery for a while, and die. 

But Burke was created for parliament. His mind 
was born with a determination to things of grandeur 
and difficulty. 

" Spumantemque dari, pecora inter inertia, votis 
Optat aprum, aut fulvum descendere monte leonem." 

Nothing in the ordinary professions, nothing in the 
trials or triumphs of private life, could have satisfied 
the noble hunger and thirst of his spirit of exertion. 
This quality was so predominant, that to it a large 
proportion of his original failures, and of his unfitness 
for general public business, which chiefly belongs to 
detail, is to be traced through life. No Hercules 
could wear the irresistible weapons and the lion's 
skin with more natural supremacy ; but none could 
make more miserable work with the distaff. Burke's 
magnitude of grasp, and towering conception, were 
so much a part of his nature that he could never forego 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 126 

their exercise, however unsuited to the occasion. 
Let the object be as trivial as it might, his first in- 
stinct was to turn it into all shapes of lofty specula- 
tion, and try how far it could be moulded and mag- 
nified into the semblance of greatness. If he had no 
large national interest to summon him, he winged 
his tempest against a turnpike bill ; or flung away 
upon the petty quarrels and obscure peculations of the 
underlings of office, colours and forms that might 
have emblazoned the fall of a dynasty. 

It is only consistent with this poAver, that but few 
recollections of his private thoughts should remain. 
His conversation was remarkable for fluency and va- 
riety ; and Johnson's character of it must have been 
deserved. — " Sir, if a stranger were to be driven with 
Mun Burke under a gateway, from a shower, he must 
discover him to be a great man." But his thoughts 
had little to do with the level of societ3r. Where 
his treasure was, there were his watchinga and his 
aspirations ; and even the fragments of his familiar 
talk, that remain, generally bear some reference to 
the public and engrossing topics of the orator and 
the statesman. — Windham, always high-flown, had 
been paying some extravagant compliment to the old 
French noblesse. Burke, who, with all his abhor- 
rence of the revolution, was fully awake to the fol- 
lies of the old regime, took his pupil to task on the 
subject. 

" Sir," said he, " you should disdain levity on such 
a theme. I well knew the unhappy condition of 
those gentlemen. They were brave, gay, and grace- 
ful; they had much more honour than those who 
tore them down and hunted them like wild beasts ; 
and to the full as much virtue as those who libelled 
them most with the want of it; but, for all the true 
enjoyment of life, for every thing in the shape of 
substantial happiness, they might as well have been 
so many galley-slaves. Shut out from every natural 
exertion, and. of course, from every natural reward 

L2 



126 GEOROE THE FOURTH. [1787/ 

of a manly understanding ; from the professions ; 
from literature, except as scribblers of love-songs ; 
and from ambition, except as the wearers of blue 
and red ribands, and hangers-on about a court ; what 
could they enjoy ? Political distinction, the noblest 
stirrer of the indolence of man, was closed upon 
them. They had nothing for it, but to die of war 
or ennui. They absolutely did nothing. Their very 
look wearied me : I would rather have looked on the 
sculls in the catacombs." 

" Yet," retorted Windham, " I suppose not from 
iheir industry. I never heard that they. did much." 

" True, sir," gravely answered Burke ; " but they 
don't shock one's feelings hy pretending to be alive T^ 

Yet he was sometimes provoked into humour. 
David Hartley, who had been employed as a nego- 
tiator of the treaty with America, was remarkable 
for the length and dulness of his speeches. One day, 
when Burke was prepared to take an important part 
in the debate, he saw, to his infinite vexation, the 
house melting down, under Hartley's influence, from 
an immense assemblage into a number scarcely suf- 
ficient to authorize the Speaker's keeping the chair. 
In the course of this heavy harangue. Hartley had 
occasion to desire that some clause in the riot act 
should be read at the table. Burke could restrain 
himself no longer. " The riot act," said he, starting 
from his seat ; " my honourable friend desires the 
riot act to be read ! What would he have 1 Does 
he not see that the mob has dispersed already 1" 

It was of this interminable talker against time, 
that Jenkinson, the first Lord Liverpool, told the 
amusing story, — that, seeing Hartley rise to speak, 
he left the house to breathe a little of the fresh air. 
A fine June evening tempted him on. It was no 
more than five o'clock. He went home, mounted 
his horse, and rode to his villa, some miles from 
town ; where he dined, rambled about the grounds, 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 127 

and then returned at an easy pace to London. But 
the hour was now nine o'clock ; and conceiving that 
the division must be nigh, he sent a note to the house 
to inquire what had been done, and who had spoken. 
The answer returned was, that " nobody had spoken 
but Mr. Hartley, and that he was speaking still." 
The note, however, contained the cheering conjec- 
ture, " that he might be expected to close soon." 
Even that conjecture was disappointed ; for, when 
Jenkinson at last went down to Westminster, he 
found Hartley on his legs, in the same position in 
which he had left him half a day before," pouring out 
the same sleepy wisdom, and surrounded by a slum- 
bering house. The story does not tell by what means 
this inveterate haranguer was ever induced to con- 
clude. But he had, by that time, been speaking five 
hours. 

Fitzpatrick was one of the prince's circle, which 
he adorned by his wit and courtly manners. He 
was a handsome man, with the air of fashion, and 
the acquirements which belong to a life spent in the 
first opportunities of cultivating both mind and man- 
ners. Like all the leading whigs, he was distin- 
guished for those poetical jeux d'esprit, those toy- 
ings about the foot of Parnassus, which enabled them 
to possess the pleasures, and some of the reputation, 
of poetry, without challenging criticism. They 
wrote in the spirit of the French school of " royal 
and noble" poets, and with that easy mixture of sport- 
iveness and sarcasm which raised the laugh of the 
moment, and passed away — the true spirit of the 
vers de soci^t^. But they sometimes affected a graver 
strain ; and Fitzpatrick's " Inscription on the Temple 
of Friendship, at St. Anne's Hill," has, with Horatian 
lightness, a touch of that melancholy which so deli- 
cately shades the mirth of the Epicurean bard. 

" The star whose radiant beams adorn 
With vivid light the rising morn,— 



i28 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 1 1787 

The season changed, with milder ray 
Cheers the sweet hour of parting day ; 
So Friendship (of the generous breast 
The earliest and the latest guest), 
m youth's rich mom with ardour glows, 
And brightens life's serener close. 

Benignant power ! in this retreat, 
Oh, deign to fix thy tranquil seat ! 
Where, raised above life's duslty vale, 
Thy favouritei. brighter scenes shall hail ; 
Think of the past but as the past, 
And know true happiness at last. 
From life's too anxious toils remote, 
To thee the heart and soul devote ; 
(No more by idle dreams betrayed,) 
See life, whaft life's at best, a shade; 
Leave' fools to fling their hearts away ; 
And scorn the idol of the day. 
Yes ! while the iiowret's in its prime. 
We' 11 bredthe the bloom, redeem the time, 
Nor waste a single glance to know, 
What cares disturb the world below !"' 

Fitzpatrick, educated with Fox, brought into public 
life with him, initiated at Brookes's, and familiar 
with the whole round of high life, was inevitably a 
Foxite. Fox made him secretary of war, and his 
faith was never impeached, among the changes of a 
time rich in political versatility. It would have been 
fortunate for this attractive personage, if he had not 
urged his fidelity into an imitation of more than 
the public life of his friend. But he played deep, 
and exhausted his income and his life together in a 
round of dissipation. Fox, by some marvellous 
power, resisted the effects of gaming, politics, and 
pleasure alike ; misfortune seemed to rebound from 
him, until it was at last weary of its attacks ; and 
Fox was left to almost the tranquil age of a philoso- 
pher. But Fitzpatrick's powerful frame broke down 
into premature decay, and for some years before his 
death, he could be scarcely said to live. 

The trial of Hastings had brought Sir Philip Fran- 
cis into public notice, and his strong Foxite princi- 
ples introduced him to the prince's friends. His rise 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 129 

is still unexplained. From a clerk in the War-ojffice, 
he had been suddenly exalted into a commissioner for 
regulating the affairs of India, and sent to Bengal 
' with an appointment, estimated at ten thousand 
pounds a-year. On his return to England he joined 
opposition, declared violent hostility against Hast- 
ings, and gave his most zealous assistance to the 
prosecution ; though the house of commons would 
not suffer him to be on the committee of impeach- 
ment. Francis was an able and effective speaker ; 
with an occasional wildness of manner and eccen- 
tricity of expression, which, if they sometimes pro- 
voked a smile, often increased the interest of his 
statements. 

But the usual lot of those W'ho have identified 
themselves with any one public subject rapidly over- 
took him. His temperament, his talents, and his 
knowledge were all Indian. With the impeachment 
he was politically born, with it he lived, and when 
it withered away, his adventitious and local celebrity 
perished along with it. He clung to Fox for a few 
years after; but while the great leader of opposition 
found all his skill necessary to retain his party in ex- 
istence, he was not likely to solicit a partisan at once 
so difficult to keep in order and to employ. The 
close of his ambitious and disappointed life was spent 
in ranging along the skirts of both parties, joining 
neither, and speaking his mind with easy, and per- 
haps sincere, scorn of both ; leprobating the whigs, 
during their brief reign, for their neglect of fancied 
promises ; and equally reprobating the ministry for 
their blindness to fancied pretensions. 

But he was still to have a momentary respite for 
fame. While he was going, down into that oblivion 
which rewards the labours of so many politicians ; a 
pamphlet, ascribing Junius's letters to Sir Philip, ar- 
rested his descent. Its arguments were plausible ; 
and, for a while, opinion appeared to be in favour of 
the conjecture, notwithstanding a denial from the 



130 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [l787. 

presumed Junius; which, however, had much the 
air of his feeling no strong dislike to being suspected 
of this new title to celebritJ^* But further exami- 
nation extinguished the title; and left the secret, 
which had perplexed so many unravellers of literary 
webs, to perplex the grave idlers of generations to 
come. 

Yet the true wonder is not the concealment, for 
a multitude of causes might have produced the con- 
tinued necessity even after the death of the writer, 
but the feasibility with which the chief features of 
Junius may be fastened on almost every writer, of 
the crowd for whom claims have been laid to this 
dubious honour; while, in every instance, some 
discrepance finally starts upon the eye, which ex- 
cludes the claim. 

Burke had more than the vigour, the information, 
and the command of language ; but he was incapa- 
ble of the virulence and the disloyalty. Home 
Tooke had the virulence and the disloyalty in 
superabundance ; but he wanted the cool sarcasm 
and the polished elegance, even if he could have 
been fairly supposed to be at once the assailant and 
the defender. Wilkes had the information and the 
wit ; but his style was incorrigibly vulgar, and all 
its metaphors were for and from the mob : in addi- 
tion, he would have rejoiced to declare himself the 
writer : his well-known answer to an inquiry on the 
subject was, "Would to Heaven I had!" Utinam 
scripsissem ! Lord George Germaine has been lately 
brought forward as a candidate ; and the evidence 
fully proves that he possessed the dexterity of style, 
the powerful and pungent remark, and even the in- 
dividual causes of bitterness and partisanship, which 
might be supposed to stimulate Junius : but, in the 

* His note, on the occasion, to the editor of one of the newspapers, 
might mean any thing or nothing. It was in this style : — " Sir, you hare 
attributed to me the writing of Junius's letters. If you choose to propa. 
gate a false and malicious report, you may. " Yours, &c. " P. F " 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 131 

private correspondence of Junius with his printer, 
Woodfall, there are contemptuous allusions to Lord 
George's conduct in the field, which at once put an 
end to the question of authorship. 

Dunning possessed the style, the satire, and the 
partisanship ; but Junius makes blunders in his law, of 
which Dunning must have been incapable. Gerard 
Hamilton (Single-speech) might have written the 
letters, but he never possessed the moral courage ; 
and was, besides, so consummate a coxcomb, that 
his vanity must have, however involuntarily, let out 
the secret. The argument, that he was Junius, from 
his notoriously using the same peculiarities of 
phrase, at the time when all the world was in full 
chase of the author, ought of itself to be decisive 
against him ; for nothing can be clearer, than that 
the actual writer was determined on concealment, 
and that he would never have toyed with his dan- 
gerous secret so much in the manner of a schoolgirl, 
anxious to develop her accomplishments. 

It is with no wish to add to the number of the 
controversialists on this bluestocking subject, that a 
conjecture is hazarded ; that Junius will be found, if 
ever found, among some of the humbler names of 
the list. If he had been a political leader, or, in any 
sense of the word, an independent man, it is next 
to impossible that he should not have left some in- 
dication of his authorship. But it is perfectly easy 
to conceive the case of a private secretary, or de- 
pendant of a political leader, writing, by his com- 
mand, and for his temporary purpose, a series of 
attacks on a ministry ; which, when the object was 
gained, it was of the highest importance to bury, so 
far as the connexion was concerned, in total oblivion. 
Junius, writing on his own behalf, would have, in all 
probability, retained evidence sufficient to substan- 
tiate his title, when the peril of the discovery should 
have passed away, which it did within a few years ; 
for who would have thought, in 1780, of punishing 



13i5 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1787 

even the libels on the king in 1770 ? or when, if the 
peril remained, the writer would have felt himself 
borne on a tide of popular applause high above the 
inflictions of law. 

But, writing- for another, the most natural result 
was, that he should have been pledged to extinguish 
all proof of the transaction; to give up every frag- 
ment that could lead to the discovery at any future 
period ; and to surrender the whole mystery into the 
hands of the superior, for whose purposes it had 
been constructed, and who, while he had no fame to 
acquire by its being made public, might be undone 
by its betrayal. 

The marks of private secretaryship are so strong, 
that all the probable conjectures have pointed to 
writers under that relation; Lloyd, the private se- 
cretary of George Grenville ; Greatrakes, Lord 
Shelburne's private secretary; Rosenhagen, who 
was so much concerned in the business of Shel- 
burne House, that he may be considered as a second 
secretary ; and Macauley Boyd, who was perpetually 
about some public man, and who was at length fixed 
by his friends on Lord Macartney' s establishment, 
and went with him to take office in India. 

But, mortifying as it may be to the disputants on 
the subject, the discovery is now beyond rational 
hope ; for Junius intimates his having been a spec- 
tator of parliamentary proceedings even farther back 
than the year 1743 ; which, supposing him to have 
been twenty years old at the time, would give him 
more than a century for his experience. In the long 
interval since 1772, when the letters ceased, not the 
slightest clew has been discovered ; though doubtless 
the keenest inquiry was set on foot by the parties 
assailed. Sir William Draper died with but one wish, 
though a sufficiently uncharitable one, that he 
could have found out his castigator before he took 
leave of the world. Lord North often avowed his 
total ignorance of the writer. The king's reported 



1787.] THE prince's friends. 133 

observation to Gen. Desaguiliers, in 1772, "We know 
who Junius is, and he will write no more," is unsub- 
stantiated ; and if ever made, was probably prefaced 
with a supposition ; for no publicity ever followed ; 
and what neither the minister of the day nor hia 
successors ever knew, could scarcely have come to 
the king-'s knowledge but by inspiration, nor rem.ained 
locked up there but by a reserve not far short of a 
political error. 

But the question is not worth the trouble of disco- 
very ; for, since the personal resentment is past, its 
interest can arise only from pulling the mask off the 
visage of some individual of political emmence, and 
giving us the amusing contrast of his real and his as- 
sumed physiognomy ; or from unearthing some great 
unknown genius. But the leaders have been already 
excluded; and the composition of the letters de- 
manded no extraordinary powers. Their secret in- 
formation has been vaunted ; but Junius gives us no 
more than what would now be called the " chat of 
the clubs ;" the currency of conversation, which any 
man mixing in general life might collect in his half- 
hour's walk do^vn St. James's Street : he gives us no 
insight into the purposes of government; of the 
counsels of the cabinet he knows nothing. The style 
was undeniably excellent for the purpose, and its 
writer must have been a man of ability. If it had 
been original, he might have been a man of genius ; 
but it was notoriously formed on Col. Titus's letter, 
which, from its strong peculiarities, is of easy imita- 
tion. The crime and the blunder together of Junius 
were that he attacked the king, a man so publicly 
honest and so personally virtuous, that his assailant 
inevitably pronounced himself a libeller. But if he 
had restricted his lash to the contending politicians of 
the day, justice would have rejoiced in his vigorous 
severity. Who could have regretted the keenest ap- 
plication of the scourge to the Duke of Grafton, the 
most incapable of ministers, and the most openly 

M 



134 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [178S 

and offensively profligate of men ; to the indomitable 
selfishness of Mansfield ; to the avarice of Bedford, 
the suspicions negotiator of the scandalous treaty of 
1763; or to the slippered and drivelling ambition of 
North, sacrificing an empire to his covetousness of 
power ? 



CHAPTER VIII. 

The King's Illness. 



The prince's adoption of whig politics had deeply 
offended his royal father ; for the coalition ministry 
had made Fox personally obnoxious to the monarch, 
who remembered its power by a series of mortifica- 
tions, so keen that they had inspired the desperate 
idea of abandoning England for a time, and seeking 
refuge for his broken spirit and insulted authority in 
Hanover. This conception the king was said to have 
so far matured as to have communicated to Thurlow; 
who, however, repelled it in the most direct manner, 
telling his majesty, — that " though it might be easy 
to go to Hanover, it might be dijfficult to return to 
England ; that James the Second's was a case in point ; 
and that the best plan was, to let the coalition take 
their way for a while, as they were sure to plunge 
themselves into some embarrassment, and then he 
might have them at his disposal." 

The advice was solid and successful. The king 
thenceforth exhibited his aversion to the ministry in 
the most open manner, by steadily refusing to bestow 
a single English peerage, while they were in power ; 
and it was surmised, that Fox was driven by his 
consciousness of this total alienation, to thfe rash and 
defying measure of the India bill, as a support against 



1788.] THE king's illness. 135 

the throne. The g-ame was a bold one ; for its suc- 
cess would have made Fox king of lords, commons, 
and people ; and George the Third, king of masters 
of the stag-hounds, gentlemen of the bed-chamber, 
and canons of Windsor. But it failed, and its fail- 
ure was ruin. It not merely overthrew Fox, but it 
spread the ruin to every thing that bore the name. 
His banner was not simply borne down in the casual 
fortunes.of the fight ; but it was broken, trampled on, 
and extinguished. By the India bill the languors of 
political warfare were turned into the fierceness of 
personal combat ; and whiggism, pressed by the new- 
armed wrath of the monarch, and losing its old 
refuge in the popular sympathy, hated by the throne, 
and repelled by the nation, feebly dispersed on the 
field. 

Such is the fate of the noblest parties, when the 
spirit that once animated them has passed away. 
The men of 1688 would have found it impossible to 
recognise their descendants, in the shifting politi- 
cians;* of the eighteenth century; but W be to the 
people whose liberties depend upon the character of 
individuals ! The revolution itself would have been 
a mockery, but for its taking refuge in the manliness 
and religious virtue of the nation. All the over- 
throws of all the tyrannies of ancient or modern 
days were never able to make corruption free ; more 
than the loudest professions of principle ever made 
a profligate the fit trustee and champion of national 
freedom. The personal vice nullifies and contami- 
nates the public profession. No revolution ever 
succeeded, nor ever deserved to succeed, which was 
not demanded by the same natural and righteous 
necessity which demands the defence of our fireside ; 
and which was not conducted by men unstained by 
tlie crime of individual ambition, or the deeper crime 
of bartering the national blood for their own avarice, 
licentiousness, or revenge; — men who felt them- 
selves periling their lives for an object that dignifies 



136 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1788, 

death ; and in the impulse of holiness and faith 
offering up their existence a willing and solemn sa- 
crifice to their fellow-men and their God. 

The success of the first French revolution is no 
answer to this principle ; for France had showed 
only the frightful rapidity with which the name of 
freedom can be vitiated ; and the incalculable means 
of public explosion and misery which may exist un- 
der the surface of the most ostentatious patriotism. 
The second revolution is yet to display its results ; 
but auspicious and justifiable as has been its com- 
mencement, its only security will be found in puri- 
fying the habits of the people. 

If Italy, with her magnificent powers, her vivid 
susceptibility of character, her living genius, and 
her imperishable fame, — Italy, where every foot of 
ground was the foundation of some monument of 
the most illustrious supremacy of the human mind, 
— is now a prison, the crime and the folly are her 
own ; her own vices have riveted the chain round her 
neck, her own hand has barred the dungeon ; and in 
that dungeon she will remain for ever, if she wait 
until vice shall give vigour to her limbs, or super- 
stition throw back the gates of her living sepulchre. 
A purer influence must descend upon her. A deli- 
verer, not of the earth, earthy, — ^but an immortal visit- 
ant, shedding the light of holiness and religion from 
Its vesture, must come upon her darkness ; and, like 
the angel that came to Peter, bid her awake and 
follow. 

If Spain and Portugal are still convulsed with civil 
discord, who can hope to see rational freedom ever 
existing in those lands, while the corruption of the 
people feeds the license of the throne ; while, if the 
king imprisons, the peasant stabs ; while, if the 
crown violates the privileges of the subject, the 
subject habitually violates the honour of the holiest 
ties of our nature ; while, if government is ty- 
ranny, private life is rapine, promiscuous passion, 



1788.] THE KING S ILLNESS. 137 

and merciless revenge 1 Let the changes be as spe< 
cious as they may, the political suffering will only 
deepen, until the personal reform comes to redeem 
the land ; until faith is more than an intolerant su- 
perstition, courage than assassination, and virtue 
than confession to a monk. Till then, freedom will 
be but a name ; and the fall of a Spanish or Portu- 
guese tyrant but a signal for his assailants to bury 
their poniards in each other's bosoms ; constitution 
will be but an upbreaking of the elements of society ; 
and the plunging of despotism into the gulf, but a 
summons to every gloomy and furious shape of evil 
below, to rise upon the wing, and darken and poison 
the moral atmosphere of mankind. 

The India bill gave the final blow to the existence 
of the old whigs. The name had long survived the 
reality ; but now even the name perished. When 
the fragments of the party were collected, in the 
course of years, after their almost desperate disper- 
sion ; they were known by another name ; and the 
new whigs, however they might claim the honours 
of the old, were never recognised as successors to 
the estate. From this period, Pitt and toiyism 
were paramount. Fox, defeated in his ambition of 
being a monarch, was henceforth limited to such 
glories as were to be found in perpetual discomfiture. 
Unequalled in debate, he talked for twenty years, 
and delighted the senate ; was the idol of Westmin- 
ster, the clubs, and the conversations at Devonshire 
House ; but saw himself in an inexorable minority in 
the only place where triumph was worthy of his abi- 
lities or dear to his ambition. Perhaps, too, if Fox 
had never existed, his rival might never have risen 
to eminence ; for even great powers require great 
opportunities, and the struggle with the colossal 
frame and muscle of Fox's genius might be essen- 
tiul to mature the vigour of his yomig antagonist 
and conqueror. Still, when all hope of wresting the 
supremacy out of Pitt's hand was past, the exercise 

M2 



138 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1788. 

was useful ; and Fox, for the rest of his days, had 
the infelicitous honour of keeping those powers in 
practice, whose inaction might have dropped the 
sceptre. He was the noblest captive linked to Pitt's 
chariot-wheel, but to that chariot-wheel he was 
linked for life ; and no other arm could have so 
powerfully dragged his rival's triumphal car up the 
steeps of fame. 

The prince unhappily soon created a new griev- 
ance, that came home more directly to the royal 
bosom than even his politics. RoUe's allusion to his 
marriage with Mrs. Fitzherbert* was believed by the 
king to be true, and no act could be calculated to give 
deeper offence to the monarch, as a parent, a Pro- 
testant, or a man of virtue. The lady was high- 
bred and handsome ; and, though by seven years the 
prince's elder, and with the formidable drawback of 
having been twice a widow, her attractions might 
justify the civilities of fashion. But her rank and 
her religion were barriers, which she must have 
known to be impassable. 

The king was peculiarly sensitive to mesalliances 
in the blood royal. The Marriage Act of 1772, had 
originated in the royal displeasure at the marriages 
of his brothers the Dukes of Cumberland and Glou- 
cester, with subjects ;t and the determination with 

* Mrs. Fitzherbert was the daughter of Wm. Smythe, Esq., of Tonge 
Castle, and niece of Sir E. Smythe, Bart., of Acton Burnel, Salop. Her 
sister was married to Sir Camaby Haggerstone, Bart. At an early age 
she married Weld, of Lulworth Castle, Dorset. On his death she mar- 
ried Fitzherbert, of Swinnerton, Leicestershire, a remarkably striking 
person, who died of either over-exertion in a walk from Bath to town, or 
some imprudence at the burning of Lord Mansfield's house, in the riots 
of 1780. The lady was a Roman Catholic. 

t The Duke of Cumberland had married Mrs. Horton, Lord Irnhain'3 
daughter ; the Duke of Gloucester the Countess Dowager of Walde- 
grave, but this marriage was not acknowledged for some time after. 
The bill passed rapidly through parliament, yet was debated with un- 
usual perseverance in all its stages. With the public it was highly 
tinpopular, and was assailed by every weapon of seriousness and ridi- 
cule. It was described as intolerably aristocratical ; as insulting to 
English birth and beauty ; as violating one of the iirst laws of our 
Dein^; and even as giving a direct encouragement to crime. Epigitunf 



1788.] THE king's illness. 139 

which the bill was urged through the legislature 
against the strongest resistance, showed the interest 
which his majesty took in preserving the succession 
clear. 

But the prince's error had gone further than the 
passionate violation of an unpopular law ; for the 
marriage of the heir-apparent with a Roman Catholic 
must have defeated his claim to the throne. 

To this hour the marriage has been neither proved 
nor disproved. It was rumoured that the lady's 
scruples were soothed by having the ceremonial per- 
formed according to the rites of her own church. 
But no Roman Catholic dispensation, guiltily facile 
as such license is in that church, could have acquittec 
the parties of the crime of sustaining a connexion 
notoriously void by the laws of the land. Fox'« 
declaration in the house admits of no subterfuge ? 
language could not have been found more distinctly 
repelling the charge ; and that Mrs. Fitzherbert fel; 
it to be decisive, is palpable from the ranger and 
alienation with which she, for years after, affected to 
treat him. However, she still enjoys at least the 
gains of the connexion ; and up to the hoary age oi 

and satires innumerable were showered upon the bill, and its opponent; 
certainly had all the wit and all the women on their side. One of thoff ( 
jeilx dP esprit was — 

THE ROYAL MARRIAGE ACT. 

Says Dick to Tom, " This Act appears 

The oddest thing alive ; 
To take the crown at eighteen years, 

The wife at twenty-five. 

The thing a puzzle must remain^ 

For, as old Dowdeswell* said, 
' So early if one's fit to reign, 

Une must be fit to wed.' " 

Says Tom to Dick, " The man's a fool, 

Or knows no rubs of life ; 
Good friend, 'tis easier fe'"to rule 

A kingdom than a wife !" 

* An opponent of the bill. 



140 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1788. 

seventy-five, talmly draws her salary of ten thousand 
pounds a-year ! 

The theme is repulsive. But the writer degrades 
his moral honour, and does injustice to the general 
cause of truth, who softens down such topics into the 
simplicity of romance. Yet, betAveen the individuals 
in question there can be no comparison. The prince 
was in the giddiest period of youth and inexperience ; 
he was surrounded by temptation ; it was laid in his 
way by individuals craftily accomplished in every art 
of extravagance and ruin. For him to have escaped 
the snare would have been not less than the most 
fortuuHte of accidents, or an exhibition of the man- 
liest sense and virtue. But for those who ministered 
to his errors, or shared in them, the condemnation 
must be altogether of a deeper die. 

In this most unhappy intercourse originated all the 
serious calamities of the prince's life. From its com- 
mencement it openly drew down the indignation of 
his excellent father ; it alienated his general popu- 
larity in an immediate and an extraordinary degree ; 
it shook the confidence of the wise and good in those 
hopes of recovery and reformation which such minds 
are the most generous to conceive, and the most un- 
willing to cast away ; the cold gravity of this unlover- 
like connexion gave it the appearance of a system ; 
and its equivocal and offensive bondage was obvi- 
ously a fixture foi life. It embarrassed him with the 
waste of a double household, when he was already 
sinking under the expenses of one ; and precipitated 
him into bankruptcy. It entangled him more and 
more inextricably with the lower members of that 
cabal who gathered round him in the mask of poli- 
tics only to plunder; and who, incapable of the digni- 
fied and honourable feelings that may attach to party, 
cared nothing for the nation, or for political life, 
beyond what they could filch for their daily bread 
from the most pitiful sources of a contemptible popu- 
larity. It disheartened all his higher friiends, the 



1788.] THE king's illness. 141 

Duke of Portland, Fox, Grey, Burke, and the other 
leaders of opposition ; while it betrayed the prince's 
name and cause into the hands of men who could 
not touch even royalty without leaving a stain. Fi- 
nally, it destroyed all chance of happiness in his 
subsequent marriage ; and was the chief ingredient 
in that cup of personal anxiety and public evil which 
was so sternly forced to his lips almost to the close 
of his days. 

Fox's declaration in the house had given the first 
example of the pangs which the prince was to feel. 
It unquestionably threw dishonour on the connexion. 
Yet, to expect Fox to retract his words, and this too 
when their object was gained by the payment of the 
prince's debts, was utterly hopeless. Grey was 
then sounded ;* but he declined this singular office. 
Sheridan was the next resource ; and, with that mi- 
serable pliancy, which, in him, resulted less from a 
casual deference to the will of others, than from a 
total want of moral elevation, a guilty callousness 
to the principle of self-respect, he undertook to equi- 
vocate the house into sufferance. In allusion to the 
prince's offer, through Fox, to undergo an examina- 
tion in the lords, he affectedly said, — " that the house 
deserved credit for decorum, in not taking advan- 
tage of the offer, and demanding such an inquiry. 
But while his royal highness's feelings had been, 
doubtless, considered on the occasion, he must take 
the liberty of saying, however some might think it a 
subordinate consideration, that there was another 
person, entitled, in every delicate and honourable 
mind, to the same attention ; one whom he would not 
otherwise venture to describe, or allude to, but by 
saying it was a name which malice or ignorance 
alone could attempt to injure, and whose character 
and conduct claimed and were entitled to the truest 
respect." 

* Moore's Life of Sheridan. 



143 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1788. 

Nothing could be more filmy than this veil ; and 
nothing more contemptible than the conduct of 
the man who exhibited himself thus ready to cast it, 
thin as it was, across the eyes of the house. But 
the question had been settled long before ; the equi- 
vocation was scornfully left undisturbed, and the in- 
dividuals were given over to that tardy prudence 
which will learn no lessons but from misfortune. 

A second and more bitter proof of the public feel- 
ings rapidly followed. In October, 1788, symptoms 
of that disease of the mind, which afterward broke 
out into such violence, were apparent in the king. 
In November the fears of the nation were con- 
firmed ; and, in the midst of a strong expression of 
public sorrow, it was declared expedient to provide 
for the government of the country. 

On the occasion of a similar, but slighter attack, 
in 1765, his majesty's speech to parliament, on his 
recovery, declared, that the " thoughts with which 
the memory of his illness affected him, touching the 
welfare of his people and his children, urged him to 
propose to its consideration, whether it might not be 
expedient to vest in him the power of appointing, 
from time to time, by instruments in writing, under 
his sign manual, the queen, or some other person of 
the royal family usually residing in Great Britain, to 
be the guardian of any of his children, who might 
succeed to the throne before the age of eighteen ; 
and to be regent of the kingdom until his successor 
should attain that age, subject to the restrictions and 
regulations specified in the act made on occasion of 
his father's death. — The regent so appointed to be 
assisted by a council, composed of the several per- 
sons who, by reason cf their dignities and offices, 
were constituted members of the council established 
by that act, together with those wliom they might 
think proper to leave to his majesty's nomination."* 

♦April 24 1765. 



1788.] THE KINGS ILLNESS. 143 

A bill on this principle, hut with considerable mo- 
difications relative to the individuals who might be 
appointed to the regency and guardianship, was 
passed in the same year.* 

The recurrence of the king's illness made the im- 
mediate meeting of parliament necessary: and on 
the 20th of November, the day to which it had been 
prorogued, the session began. But the opinions of 
the royal physicians were still so dubious, and both 
ministers and opposition were still so imperfectly 
prepared for any direct measures, that a fortnight's 
adjournment was agreed on without difficulty. 

Fox was then absent on a foreign tour ; but he had 
been sent for, and was expected hourly. In the 
mean time, Sheridan appears to have acted as the 
chief counsellor of opposition, in which capacity he 
addressed the following letter to the prince rf 

" Sir, — From the intelligence of to-day, we are led 
to think that Pitt will make something more of a 
speech, in moving to adjourn, on Thursday, than 
was at first imagined. In this case, we presume 
your ro3'-al highness will be of opinion that we must 
not be totally silent. 1 possessed Pajiiel yesterday 
with my sentiments on the line of conduct which 
appears to me best to be adopted on this occasion, 
that they might be submitted to your royal high- 
ness's consideration ; and I take the liberty of re- 
peating my firm conviction, that it will greatly 
advance your royal highness's credit, and, in case 
of events, lay the strongest grounds to bafl^ie every 
attempt at opposition to your royal highness's just 
claims and rights, that the language of those who 
may be in any sort suspected of knowing your royal 
highness's wishes and feelings, should be that of 
great moderation in disclaiming all party views, and 

* May 15, 1765. t Mooie's Life of Sheridan. 

t'Captaln Payne (afterward Admiral), the piince's private secretary. 



144 GEORGE THE FOURTH, [1788, 

avowing the utmost readiness to acquiesce in any 
reasonable delay. 

" At the same time, I am perfectly aware of the 
arts which will be practised, and the advantages 
which some people will attempt to gain by time. 
But I am equally convinced, that a third party wiU 
soon appear, whose efforts may, in the most decisive 
manner, prevent this sort of situation and proceed- 
ing from continuing long. 

"Payne will probably have submitted to your 
yoyal highness more fully my idea on this subject, 
towards which I have already taken some successful 
steps. Your royal highness will, I am sure, have 
the goodness to pardon the freedom with which I 
give my opinion ; after which I have only to add, 
that whatever your royal highness's judgment de- 
cides, shall be the pride of my conduct, and will 
undoubtedly be so to others.'* 

Those negotiations are now chiefly valuable fo? 
the light which they throw on human nature. Lord 
Chancellor Thurlow was destined to afford the chief 
illustration. His lordship, so well known as a lead- 
ing lawyer, and a clamorous partisan, was especially 
a boaster of immaculate principle. The present 
transaction showed him to be also a low intriguei 
and a contemptible hypocrite. While he sat at the 
council-table of the ministry he was intriguing with 
opposition ; while he was intriguing with opposition 
he was watching the king's physicians ; and the mo- 
ment he was assured, from the king's symptoms^ 
that he might cheat both ministers and opposition— 
without the loss of his place ! he marched down to 
the house, proclaimed himself the inalienable ser- 
vant of the throne, and obtested Heaven, in language 
little short of blasphemy, that—" whenever he forgot 
his king, might his God forget him." 

Sheridan's allusion to " the third party," referred 
Id Thurlow. This negotiation took Fox by sui- 



1788.] THE king's illness. 143 

prise, who had been previously pledged to give the 
seals to Loughborough. Thurlow, however, was 
now hired, and must have his hire ; to which Fox, 
after no slight struggle with himself, acceded. His 
letter on the subject is a striking instance of the vex- 
atious compliances, to which men are sometimes 
driven who seem to be at the height of their ambi- 
tion, and whom the world looks on as carrying every 
thing by their will. 

" Dear Sheridan, — I have swallowed the pill : a 
most bitter one it was, — and have written to Lord 
Loughborough, whose answer must, of course, be 
content. What is to be done next ? Should the 
prince himself, or you, or I, or Warren, speak to the 
chancellor ? The objection to the last is, that he must 
probably wait for an opportunity, and that no time is 
to be lost. Pray tell me what is to be done. I am 
convinced, after all, the negotiation will not succeed, 
and am not sure that I am sorry for it. I do not re- 
member feeling so uneasy about any political thing 
I ever did in my life. Call if you can. 

" Yours ever, « C. J. F." 

It is astonishing to see how feebly a sense of pub- 
lic decency or personal honour sometimes acts upon 
the minds of men accustomed to the traffic of poli- 
tics. In Thurlow, we have the instance of an indi- 
vidual at the head of an honourable profession, and 
therefore doubly bound to think of character ; opu- 
lent, and therefore under no necessity of consulting 
the increase of his means ; advanced in life, and 
therefore at once destitute of the excuses of young 
ambition, and incapable of the long enjoyment of 
power ; and yet involving himself in. a labyrinth of 
falsehood and self-degradation, for the wretched 
purpose of retaining place. There is a just pleasure 
in being able to state after this, that he lost the ob- 
ject of his scandalous compromise. He retained 

N 



146 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1788. 

the name of chancellor, but he lost alike the public 
respect attached to his rank, and the real power of 
. a cabinet minister. The hollowness of his colleague 
could not escape the eye of Pitt. He suffered him 
to linger for a while in a condition of half-confidence 
in the cabinet, which must have been a perpetual 
torment to his haughty heart; but even the half- 
confidence at length changed into open bickering, 
and Pitt was said to have charged him with direct 
inefficiency, as " a man who proposed nothing, op- 
posed every thing, and gave way to every thing." 
Thurlow's day was now done ; the prize had slipped 
from his hands ; and, with abilities and professional 
knowledge which might have made him one of the 
pillars of the state, he rapidly sank into the deserved 
decay of a selfish and unprincipled politician. 

The chancellor's brutal manners in private life, 
and insolence on the bench, were, as they always 
are, repaid by private and public disgust. His habit 
of execration on all subjects was notorious, and ex- 
cited a still deeper aversion ; and it was equally an 
error in opposition and in ministers, to have suffered 
themselves to negotiate with a man whose merited 
unpopulanty must have heavily encumbered any 
party which he espoused. In the crowd of pam- 
phlets and verses produced by the struggle, Thur- 
low was not forgotten ; he figured at great length 
in the " Probationary Odes," where he is represented 
as expectorating curses on every public name ; or, 
as an epigram expressed it, — 

" Here bully Thurlow flings his gall 
Alike on foes and friends ; 
Blazing, like blue devils at Vauxhall, 
With sulphur at both ends." 

The Probationary Ode, after some verses too much 
In the style of his lordship's vocabulary for quotation 
here, gives a strophe of calmer scorn ; 



1788.] THE king's ILLNESS. f47 

" Fired at her voice, I grow profane ' 

A louder yet and yet a louder strain : 
To Thurlow's lyre more daring notes belong. 

Now tremble every rebel soul, 

While on tlie foes of George I roll 
The deep-toned execrations of my song. 

In vain my brother's piety, more meek, 

Would preach my kindling fury to repose ; 

Like Balaam's ass, were he inspired to speak, 

'Twere vain, I go to curse my prince's foes." 

But Thurlow's treachery, even at the moment 
when he was probably surest of having hoodwinked 
both parties, was ludicrously visible to the new and 
old colleagues, whom he was equally ready to de- 
ceive. He even raised an open laugh against him 
at the council-table, by coming in with the prince's 
hat in his hand, which, in the confusion of his double 
plot, he had carried from a Carlton House conference. 
Fox and his friends were fully aware of his perfidy. 
A letter from Lord Loughborough, who watched 
him with the keenness of a rival candidate, lays bare 
the chancellor's policy. Thurlow had contrived to 
obtain permission to visit the king during his illness, 
and thus ascertain the chances of recovery ; a know- 
ledge which he employed for the due regulation of 
his own conscience. This privilege the letter depre 
eates, as giving him the entire advantage of posi 
tion. It is addressed to Sheridan. 

" The chancellor's object evidently is, to make his 
way by himself, and he has managed hitherto as 
one very well practised in that game. His conver- 
sations both with you and with Mr. Fox, were en- 
couraging ; but at the same time checked all expla- 
nations on his part, under a pretence of delicacy 
towards his colleagues. When he let them go to 
Salt-hill, and contrived to dine at Windsor, he cer- 
tainly took a step that most men would have felt not 
very delicate in its appearance ; and, unless there 
was some private understanding between him and 



148 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1788. 

them, not altogether fair ; especially if you add to 
it the sort of conversation he held with regard to 
them. 

"I cannot help thinking that the difficulties of ma- 
naging the patient have been excited or improved, to 
lead to the proposal of his inspection (without the 
prince being conscious of it) ; for, by that situation, 
he gains an easy and frequent access to him, and an 
opportunity of possessing the confidence of the queen. 
I believe this the more, from the account of the ten- 
derness that he showed at the first interview, for I 
am sure it is not in his character to feel any. With 
a little instruction from Lord Hawksbury, the sort of 
management that was carried on by means of the 
princess dowager, in the early part of the reign, may 
easily be practised. 

" In short, I think he will try to find the key of the 
hack stairs, and with that in his pocket, take any si- 
tuation that preserves his access, and enables him to 
hold a line between different parties." 

It was while all those vigilant eyes were. fixed 
upon him, with every movement watched, ridiculed, 
and scorned, — with the whole ordnance of party 
pointed against him, and ready to give fire at the 
first signal, — that this noble intriguer, plumed in the 
full triumph of having escaped detection, came down 
to the house, and astonished his brother peers by a 
burst of unexpected piety. But he was not suffered 
to remain long under this delusion. A storm of con- 
tempt and reproof was poured upon him by opposi- 
tion. Thurlow had contrived to weep in the deli- 
very of his speech. His tears were a new source of 
lidicule ; his reluctant piety was held up in contrast 
with his life ; and the chancellor's name was from 
that day a watchword for every thing worthless in 
political tergiversation. 

An epitaph from some unknown pen, condensed 
the public feelings on the occasion : — 



1788.] 



THE king's illness. 149 

TO THE MEMORY OF 



Here lies, beneath the prostituted mace, 
A patriot, with but one base wish — for place , 
Here lies, beneath the prostituted purse, 
A peer, with but one talent, — ^how to curse : 
Here lies, beneath the prostituted gown. 
The guardian of all honour — but his own ; 
Statesman, with but one rule his steps to guide — 
To shun the smking, take the rising side ; 
Judge, with but one base law — to serve the time, 
And see in wealth no weakness, power no crime ; 
Christian, vnth but one value for the name, 
The scoffer's prouder [)rivilege — to blaspheme ; 
Briton, with but one hope — to live a slave, 
And dig in deathless infamy his grave. 

The details of the royal illness must be passed over. 
There would be neither wisdom nor feeling- in now 
recalling to the public mind the circumstances of an 
affliction which then threw the empire into sorrow, 
and which still must give pain to bosoms which it is 
our duty to honour. But the transactions arising 
from it are invaluable, as a lesson to partisanship. 

To make the prince unrestricted regent, would 
have been to make him virtually king for the time, 
and to have made Fox " viceroy over him." The 
prospect was dazzling, but there were difficulties in 
the way. The royal fortress stood upon a hill, which 
was not to be stormed even by the boldness and vi- 
gour of opposition, while it continued loaded with 
the restraints of law, popular rights, and personal de- 
clarations and pledges of all kinds. But the time 
pressed; every hour added to the strength of the 
garrison ; and Fox took the gallant resolution of cut- 
ting away his whig encumbrances, and assaulting 
the battlements in the unembarrassed right of des- 
potism. 

" I have heard," exclaimed he, " of precedents for 
binding the regent ; but I can find none existing for 
laying a hand on an heir-apparent of full capacity 
and age to exercise power. It behooves, then, the 
house to waste not a moment, but to proceed with 
all becoming speed apd diligence to restore the sove- 
N2 



150 GEORGE THE FOTJRTH. [1788. 

reigii power and the exercise of the royal autho- 
rity. Prom what I have read of history, from the 
ideas I have formed of the law, and, what is still 
more precious, of the spirit of the constitution, I de- 
clare that I have not, in my mind, a doubt that I 
should think myself culpable, if I did not take the 
first opportunity of saying, that in the present con- 
dition of his majesty, his royal highness the Prince 
of Wales has as clear, as express a right to exer- 
cise the power of sovereignty, during the continuance 
of the illness and incapacity with which it has pleased 
God to afflict his majesty, as in the case of his ma- 
jesty's having undergone a natural demise." 

This was such a palpable abandonment of the 
first principles of constitutional law, as is to be ac- 
counted for only by that phrensy which sometimes 
seizes on powerful understandings when assailed 
by more powerful passions. Fox was evidently in- 
flamed by the sight of all the objects of his ambition 
within his grasp, into the desperate experiment of 
casting away his character, and leaving it to success 
to justify the rejection of his principles. By his lan- 
guage he had nullified the power of parliament and 
the nation alike. " The circumstance to be pro- 
vided for," he repeated, " did not depend on their de- 
liberations as a house of parliament, — it rested else- 
where." This " elsewhere" was the hereditary right 
of the prince to assume the throne, in scorn of parlia- 
ment, and without restriction. Sheridan followed 
him, and presumptuously warned the house " of the 
danger of provoking the prince's assertion of his 
claim. But Pitt instantly threw back the menace, 
in language which found an indignant echo in the 
house and the nation. 

" We have now," said he, " an additional reason 
for asserting the authority of the house, and defining 
the boundaries of right ; when the deliberative facul- 
ties of parliament are invaded, and an indecent me- 
nace is thrown out to awe our proceedings. I trust 



1788. J THE king's illness. 151 

the house will do its duty, in defiance of any threat. 
Men, who feel their native freedom, will not submit 
to a threat, however high the authority from which it 
may come." 

But Fox was the great antagonist, and it was over 
him that Pitt exulted with the loftiest sense of supe- 
riority. When he heard him utter the ominous sen- 
tence, declaring the regent's independence of parlia- 
ment, he turned round to the member who sat next 
him, and, with a brightened countenance, and striking 
his thigh, triumphantly, said, — " I'll un-tsohig the gen- 
tleman for the rest of his life."* 

Pitt, now master of the house, and secure of the 
national support, urged his measures vigorously ; and 
in the committee on the state of the nation,f carried, 
by a division of 268 to 204, after a long debate, the 
two resolutions: first, "that there was an interrup- 
tion of the royal authority ;" and secondly, " that it 
was the duty of the two houses of parliament to supply 
that defect." The next step taken by the triumphant 
minister was to imbody his intentions in a letter to 
his royal highness :— 

" Sir, — The proceedings in parliament being now 
brought to a point, which will render it necessary to 
propose to the house of commons the particular mea- 
sures to be taken for supplying the defect of the per- 
sonal exercise of the royal authority during the pre- 
sent interval ; and your royal highness having some 
time since signified your pleasure that any commu- 
nication on this subject should be in writing, I take 
the liberty of respectfully entreating your royal high- 
ness's permission to submit to your consideration the 
outlines of the plan, which his majesty's confidential 
servants humbly conceive (according to the best judg- 
ment which they are able to form), to be proper to be 
proposed in the present circumstances. 

*Moore. t Dec. 16, 1788. 



153 GEOEGE THE FOURTH. [1788. 

" It is their humble opinion, that your royal high- 
ness should be empowered to exercise the royal au- 
thority, in the name and on the behalf of his majesty, 
during- his majesty's illness ; and to do all acts which 
might legally be done by his majesty ; with provisions, 
nevertheless, that the care of his majesty's royal 
person, and the management of his majesty's house- 
hold, and the direction and appointment of the officers 
and servants therein, should be in the queen, under 
such regulations as may be thought necessary. That 
the power to be exercised by your royal highness 
should not extend to the granting real or personal 
property of the king (except as far as relates to the 
renewal of leases), to the granting any office in re- 
version, or to the granting for any other term than 
during his majesty's pleasure, any pension, or any 
office whatever, except such as must by law be 
granted for life, or during good behaviour ; nor to the 
granting any rank or dignity of the peerage of this 
realm to any person except his majesty's issue, who 
shall have attained the age of twenty-one years. 

" Those are the chief points which have occurred 
to his majesty's servants. 1 beg leave to add, that 
their ideas are formed on the supposition that his 
majesty's illness is only temporal}'', and may be of 
no long duration. It may be difficult to fix before- 
hand the precise period for which those provisions 
ought to last ; but if, unfortunately, his majesty's ill- 
ness should be protracted to a more distant period 
than there is reason at present to imagine, it will be 
open hereafter to the wisdom of parliament, to recon- 
sider these provisions whenever the circumstances 
appear to call for it. 

" If your royal highness should be pleased to require 
any further explanation on the subject, and should 
condescend to signify your orders that I should have 
the honour of attending your royal highness for that 
purpose, or to intimate any other mode in which 
your royal highness may wish to receive such ex- 



1788.] THE KING'S ILLNESS. 153 

planation, I shall respectfully wait your royal high- 
ness's commands. 

" I have the honour to be, with the utmost deference 
and submission, 

« Sir, 
" Your Royal Highness's 
" most dutiful and devoted Servant, 

«W. PITT. 
" Downing Street, Tuesday Night, Dec. 30, 1788." 

The prince's letter in answer attracted remarkable 
attention, from its tone of dignity, and its general 
grave excellence as a composition. All the leading 
persons of the prince's councils were named as the 
vnriters, and each with some degree of plausibility ; 
but the votes fell chiefly on Sheridan. However, the 
question is cleared up at last, and the authorship is 
given to Burke, on the testimony of Sir J. Mackintosh, 
and the following note of the late Sir Gilbert Elliot 
(Lord Minto), Jan. 31, 1789 : 

" There was not a word of the prince's letter to 
Pitt mine. It was originally Burke^s, altered a little, 
but not improved, by Sheridan and other critics. 

" The answer made by the prince yesterday, to the 
address of the two houses was entirely mine, and 
done in a great hurry, half an hour before it was to 
be delivered."* 

Answer to Mr. Pitfs Letter, delivered by his Royal 
Highness to the Lord Chancellor, Jan. 1, 1789. 

" The Prince of Wales learns from Mr. Pitt's let- 
ter that the proceedings in parliament are now in a 
train which enables Mr. Pitt, according to the inti- 
mation in his former letter, to communicate to the 
prince the outlines of the plan which his majesty's 
confirdential servants conceive to be proper to be pro- 
posed in the present circumstances. 

* Moore. 



154 OEORGE THE FOURTH. [1788. 

" Concerning- the steps already taken by Mr. Pitt, 
the prince is silent. Nothing done by the two houses 
of parliament can be a proper subject of his animad- 
version ; but when, previously to any discussion in 
parliament, the outlines of a scheme of government 
are sent for his consideration, in which it is proposed 
that he shall be personally and principally concerned, 
and by which the royal authority and the public wel- 
fare may be deeply aifected, the prince would be 
unjustifiable were he to withhold an explicit decla- 
ration of his sentiments. His silence might be con- 
strued into a previous approbation of a plan, the ac- 
complishment of which, every motive of duty to his 
father and sovereign, as well as of regard for the 
public interest, obliges him to consider as injurious 
to both. 

" In the state of deep distress in which the prince 
and the whole royal family were involved by the 
heavy calamity which has fallen upon the king, and, 
at a moment when government, deprived of its chief 
energy and support, seemed peculiarly to need the 
cordial and united aid of all descriptions of good sub- 
jects, it was not expected by the prince that a plan 
should be offered to his consideration, by which go- 
vernment was to be rendered difficult, if not imprac- 
ticable, in the hands of any person intended to repre- 
sent the king's authority, much less in the hands of 
his eldest son, the heir-apparent of his kingdoms, and 
the person most bound to the maintenance of his ma- 
jesty's just prerogatives and authority, as well as 
most interested in the happiness, the prosperity, and 
the glory of the people. 

" The prince forbears to remark on the several parts 
of the sketch of the plan laid before him ; he appre- 
hends it must have been formed with sufficient de- 
liberation to preclude the probability of any argument 
of his producing an alteration of sentiment in the 
projectors of it ; but he trusts with confidence to the 
wisdom and justice of parliament, when the whole 



1788.] THE king's illness. 155 

of this subject, and the circumstances connected with 
it, shall come under their deliberation. 

"He observes, therefore, only generally on tlie 
heads communicated by Mr. Pitt ; and it is with deep 
regret that the prince makes the observation, that he 
sees in the contents of that paper a project for'pfo^ 
ducing weakness, disorder, and insecurity, in every 
branch of the administration of affairs; a project for 
dividing the royal family from each other, for sepa- 
rating the court from the state ; and therefore, by 
disjoining government from its natural and accus- 
tomed support, a scheme for disconnecting the au- 
thority to command service from the powers of ani- 
mating it by reward, and for allotting to the prince 
all the invidious duties of government without the 
means of softening them to the public by any one 
act of grace, favour, or benignity. 

" The prince's feelings on contemplating this plan 
are also rendered still more painful by observing, 
that it is not founded on any general principle, but is 
calculated to infuse jealousies and suspicions (wholly 
groundless, he trusts), in that quarter whose confi- 
dence it will ever be the first pride of his Ufe to merit 
and obtain. 

" With regard to the motive and object of the limit- 
ations and restrictions proposed, the prince can have 
but little to observe. No light or information is of- 
fered him by his majesty's ministers on these points. 
They have informed him what the powers are which 
they mean to refuse him, not why they are with- 
held. 

" The prince, however, holding as he does, that it 
is an undoubted and fundamental principle of this 
constitution, that the powers and prerogatives of the 
crown are vested there as a trust for the benefit of 
the people, and that they are sacred only as they are 
necessary to the preservation of that poise and ba- 
lance of the constitution which experience has 
prdved to be the true security of the liberty o^ the 



156 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1788. 

subject, must be allowed to observe, that the plea of 
public utility ought to be strong, manifest, and urgent, 
which calls for the extinction or suspension of any 
one of those essential rights in the supreme power or 
its representative, or which can justify the prince in 
consenting, that in his person an experiment shall 
be made to ascertain with how small a portion of the 
kingly power the executive government of this 
country may be carried on. 

" The prince, has only to add, that if security for 
his majesty's repossessing his rightful government, 
whenever it shall please Providence, in bounty to 
the country, to remove the calamity with which he 
is afflicted, be any part of the object of this plan, 
the prince has only to be convinced that any measure 
is necessary, or even conducive to that end, to be 
the first to urge it, as the preliminary and paramomit 
consideration of any settlement in which he would 
consent to share. 

" If attention to what is presumed might be his 
majesty's feelings and wishes on the happy day of 
his recovery be the object, it is with the truest sin- 
cerity the prince expresses his firm conviction, that 
no event would be more repugnant to the feelings of 
his royal father, than the knowledge that the go- 
vernment of his son and representative had exhi- 
bited the sovereign power of the realm in a state of 
degradation, of curtailed authority, and diminished 
energy — a state hurtful in practice to the prosperity 
and good government of his people, and injurious in 
its precedent to the security of the monarch and the 
rights of his family. 

" Upon that part of the plan which regards the 
king's real and personal property, the prince feels 
himself compelled to remark, that it was not neces- 
sary for Mr. Pitt, nor proper to suggest to the prince, 
the restraint he proposes against his granting away 
the king's real and personal property. The prince 
does not conceive that, during the king's life, he is 



1788.] THE king's illness. 157 

by law entitled to make any such grant; and he is 
sure that he has never shown the smallest inclina- 
tion to possess any such power. But it remains 
with Mr. Pitt to consider the eventual interests of 
the royal family, and to provide a proper and natu- 
ral security against the mismanagement of them by 
others. 

" The prince has discharged an indispensable duty 
in thus giving his free opinion on the plan submitted 
to his consideration. 

" His conviction of the evil which may arise to the 
king's interests, to the peace and happiness of the royal 
family, and to the safety and welfare of the nation, 
from the government of the country remaining longer 
in its present maimed and debilitated state, out- 
weighs, in the prince's mind, every other considera- 
tion, and will determine him to undertake the pain- 
ful trust imposed upon him by the present melan- 
choly necessity (which, of all the king's subjects, 
he deplores the most), in full confidence that the af- 
fection and loyalty to the king, the experienced at- 
tachment to the house of Brunswick, and the gene- 
rosity which has always distinguished this nation, 
will carry him through the many difficulties insepa- 
rable from this critical situation, with comfort to 
himself, with honour to the king, and with advan- 
tage to the public. 

(Signed) « G. P." 

" Carlton House, January 2, 1789." 

The minister suffered no further delay to take 
place ; but brought in his propositions, and carried 
them by large majorities, in the face of the whole 
strength of opposition, armed with protests, motions, 
and the formidable resistance of the blood royal. 
The Dukes of York, Cumberland, and fifty-five other 
peers, signed a remonstrance against the restrictions. 
The piinces of the royal family even expressly 

O 



158 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1788 

refused to suffer their names to appear in the commis- 
sion for opening the session. But Pitt was not to be 
shaken ; the first reading of the bill was boldly car- 
ried in the commons ;* and another week had brought 
it to the verge of commitment ; when the struggle 
was stopped at once, by the cheering intelligence 
that the king's illness was already giving way, and that 
within a short time a perfect recovery might be ex- 
pected. Those tidings, which diffused sincere joy 
through the nation, were speedily confirmed; and 
within a month, a commission for holding the par- 
liament was issued by the king. 

This had been the lottery of politics. If the prince 
had ascended the throne, even with limited powers, 
Fox and his friends would have obtained every wish 
which it was in the regent's power to realize. A 
turn of chance flung them into political exile ; and 
the minister used his first leisure unhesitatingly to 
punish the symptoms of wavering among his own 
followers : the Duke of Queensberry, Lords Carteret 
and Malmesbury, and the Marquis of Lothian, were 
summarily dismissed from office ; but it was in Ire- 
land, where the defection had been more glaring, 
that vengeance and justice were gratified together, 
in a sweeping exclusion of functionaries venturous 
enough to speculate on London politics, and criminal 
enough to speculate on the wrong side. 

Yet the wit and eloquence of opposition were 
never more conspicuous than in those disastrous de- 
bates. Sheridan was in a perpetual glow; and, 
whether sportive or sarcastic, was the delight of the 
house. 

" I am staggered," said he, " when I hear Dr. 
Willis's assertions. I hear him attribute his ma- 
jesty's illness to twenty-seven years of study, absti- 
nence, and labour ; and he tells us that his medicine 
has cured all this. What must I think of Dr. Willis 

* Feb. 12, 1789. 



1788.] THE KINGS ILLNESS. 159 

i 

when I hear that his physic can, in one day, over- 
come the effects of seven-and-twenty years' hard 
exercise, seven-and-twenty years' study, and seven- 
and-twenty years' abstinence ? It is impossible for 
me to preserve gravity on such a subject. It re- 
minds one of the nostrums that are to cure this or 
that malady, and also disappointments in love and 
long sea voyages /" 

In allusion to a charge of insincerity in the minis- 
ter, he declared " that he believed the right honoura- 
ble gentleman sincere in his intention, though he 
did not profess Dr. Willis's gift, that of seeing 
hearts by looking into countenances. He remem- 
bered the doctor's telling the Committee, ' that he 
could thus see the heart of any man, whether he 
was sick or not.' And the declaration appeared to 
have particularly alarmed the right honourable gen- 
tleman." 

The restrictions had left the regent the power of 
making war or peace ; but had prohibited his mak- 
ing any change in the household. Sheridan treated 
this reserve with unceasing ridicule. 

"Talk of his majesty's feelings when he shall 
recover, and find his household changed ! We are 
to be told that his feelings would be less shocked 
to learn that the constitution of the country was 
changed, or part of his dominions, by an unjust war, 
lost, or, by a foolish peace, ceded to foreign poten- 
tates. What was this, but like a man who, having 
intrusted his mansion to a person, in his absence, to 
take care of it, and finding it gone to ruin, and the 
winds of heaven sulfered to blow through every part 
of it, the enclosures to be broken, the sheep to be 
shorn, and all exposed to ruin and decay ; yet should 
have no regret for those things, but feel all his anx- 
iety awakened for a few looking-glasses and worthless 
gilt lumber locked up in an old-fashioned drawing- 
room." 

Burke's appeals to the house were in a loftier 



160 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1788. 

style, and distinctly showed that he had already 
formed those views which were to be yet deve- 
loped in his immortal work on the French revolution. 

" I consider myself," said he, " fully justified in 
asserting- that Great Britain is governed by an heredi- 
tary monarchy. Heaven forbid it should ever prove 
otherwise: it is our powerful barrier, our strong 
rampart, against the ambition of mankind. It says to 
the most aspiring, * thus far shalt thou go, and no 
farther:' it shelters the subject from the tyranny of 
illegal tribunals, bloody proscriptions, and the long 
train of evils attendant upon the distractions of iU- 
guided and unprincipled republics." 

His opinion of Thurlow was contemptuously 
avowed. " What is to be done when the crown is 
in a deliquium ? It is intended, we are told, to set 
up a man with black brows and a large wig, to be a 
scarecrow to the two houses, and give a fictitious 
assent in the royal name." 

The chancellor's tears had excited great ridicule ; 
but it was left for Burke to give him the castigation 
due to his hoary hypocrisy. " The other house are 
not yet recovered from that extraordinary burst of 
the pathetic which had been exhibited the other eve- 
ning ; they have not yet dried their eyes, nor been 
restored to their placidity. The tears shed on that 
occasion were not the tears of patriots for dying 
laws, but of lords for expiring places. They were 
the ' iron tears that flowed down Pluto's cheek,' and 
rather resembled the dismal bubbling of Styx, than 
the gentle streams of Aganippe. 

" In fact, they were tears for his majesty's bread. 
There is a .manifest difference between this house 
and the other, between plebeians and patricians. We, 
in an old-fashioned way, would have said — * If we 
could no longer serve the king, we will no longer re- 
ceive his wages, we will no longer eat his bread.' 
But the lords of the household held a different Ian 
guage ; they would stick by the king's loaf as long 



1788.] THE king's ilIness. 161 

as a si gle cut of it remained. They would fasten on 
the crust, and gnaw it while two crumbs of it held 
tog-ether ; and they would proudly declare, at the 
same time, that it was the honour of the service^ the 
dignity of the office, which alone they regarded. The 
lords of the household were beyond the reach of in- 
fluence ; they were a set of saints and philosophers, 
* superior to the lusts of the flesh and the vanities 
of this world.' " 

By a fiction of law, the great seal was to represent 
the royal authority, and under this semblance of a 
king the session was to be opened. For this singular 
substitution the valid plea was, the necessity of the 
case. But it was too open to burlesque to escape 
Burke, who, amid the laughter of the house, turned 
it in all the lights of vindictive pleasantry. 

" I cannot, for my soul," he exclaimed, " under 
stand the means of this art magic, any more than 1 
can doubt the purpose. I see a phantom raised. But 
I never heard of one being raised in a family, but for 
the purpose of robbing the house. The whole cere- 
monial, instead of being a representative of the 
forms of the constitution, is a masquerade, a mum- 
mery, a piece of buffoonery, used to ridicule every 
form of government. A phantom conjured up to 
fright propriety and drive it from the isle ; a spec- 
tre, to which, as to Banquo's ghost, it might be 
said, 

* Avaunt, and quit my sight ! Let the earth hide thee ! 
Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold, 
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes 
That thou dost glare with !' " 

In adopting Fox's words, that the limitations of the 
regency went to establish a republic, and that . 
would have been the manlier way to call for a repub- 
lic at once, Burke burst into a strain of lofty scorn, 
which may have suggested the famous apostrophe—- 
^ calumniated crusaders ! tame and feeble Cer- 

02 



162 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1788. 

vantes !" — in Fox's letter to the electors of West- 
minster. 

"A republic! do I hate a republic? No. But it 
cannot be speculated upon, according to the princi- 
ples of our constitution: I love, I adore the true 
principles of a republic ; but is this the mode of in- 
stituting a republic ?" 

" O republic, how art thou libelled ! how art thou 
prostituted, buffooned, and burlesqued ! O fabric ! 
built after so many ages, and cemented by the blood 
of so many patriots, how art thou degraded ! As well 
might it be said that the creatures of the opera-house 
were representatives of heroes, the true and perfect 
Caesars, Catos, and Brutuses, as that strange and 
jumbled chaos the representative of a real republic !" 

The India bill had been the death-blow of the ori- 
ginal whigs ; the regency question was all but the 
death-blow of the party which assumed the name. 
Disunion and discredit fell upon them from that hour ; 
opposition lost its final hold on the national confi- 
dence ; and though partisanship was stiU active, and 
profession as loud as ever, the empire looked upon it 
thenceforth in its true light, that of a mere combina- 
tion to drive ministers from their places, and to usurp 
them in their own persons. The three leaders of 
opposition were equally conscious that their cause 
was lost, and this consciousness was not relieved by 
the feeling that any one of them had exhibited the 
prudence essential to great successes. Fox's asser- 
tion of the extravagant right of the prince had given 
the first advantage of the field to his antagonist. 
Sheridan's still more obnoxious threat of royal ven- 
geance had imbittered the constitutional offence by 
personal indignation; and Burke's wild indulgence 
in the impulses of an uncontrollable fancy had daz- 
zled his friends to the edge of a precipice, from 
which to retreat was ignominy, while to advance 
was ruin. 

There can now be no doubt that the triumph of 



1788.] TftE king's illness. 163 

opposition would have been the defeat of the law ; and 
that the doors of parliament might as well be closed 
at once, when an unlimited regent, in his own mis- 
interpreted right, set his foot upon the step of the 
throne. 

Burke's dissatisfaction was well known; and a 
brief but sufficiently expressive record of it is pre- 
served in a letter to his Irish friend, Lord Charle- 
mont.* " Perpetual failure," said he, " even though 
nothing in that failure can be fixed on the improper 
choice of the object, or the injudicious choice of 
means, will detract every day more and more from a 
man's credit, until he ends without success and without 
reputation. In fact, a constant pursuit even of the 
best objects, without adequate instruments, detracts 
something from the opinion of a man's judgment 
This, I think, may in part be the cause of the inac 
tivity of others of our friends who are in the vigoui 
of life, and in possession of a great degree of lead 
and authority. 

" I do not blame them, though I lament that state 
of the public mind in which the people can considei 
the exclusion of such talents and virtues from theii 
service as a point gained to them. The only point 
in w^hich I can find any thing to blame in these friends 
is, their not taking the effectual means, which they 
certainly had in their power, of making an honour- 
able retreat from their prospect of power into the pos- 
session of reputation, by an effectual defence of 
themselves. There was an opportunity which was 
not made use of for the purpose, and which could 
scarcely have failed of turning the tables on their 
adversaries." 

Such are the bitter fruits of political ambition 
even in a noble mind, instinctively repellent of all 
the basenesses, that, while they stimulate the pas- 
sions of meaner spirits, envenom their Dunisbuaent. 

Hardy's Memoir. 



164 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1788, 

Burke knew nothing of those feelings which strew 
scorpions on the pillow of the artificial and perfi- 
dious ; yet this is the letter of a vexed heart, ready 
to exclaim that all was vanity. But his triumph was 
to come ; and the time was now fast approaching 
when, with prouder objects in view than the strug- 
gle for the narrow distinctions of office, he was to 
stand forth the champion of the surviving religion, 
manliness, and loyalty of Europe ; a light to Eng- 
land, and a redeeming honour to her legislature and 
her people. 

The king's recovery had closed the contest in the 
English parliament ; but the luckless fortune of Ire- 
land reserved her for one of those blunders which 
are supposed to be indigenous to the soil. The Irish 
parliament had acknowledged the unlimited right of 
the regent almost by acclamation. There never had 
been a more precipitate worship of the rising sun. 
The Irish ministers were overwhelmed by this rush 
of new-born allegiance, or suff'ered themselves to 
swell the tide. All was principled hypocrisy and 
magnanimous defection; and the holders of office, 
the wearers of blue and green ribands, and the bear- 
ers of gold keys, black rods, and white sticks, ex- 
ulted in being able to give such costly attestation of 
their new faith as the sacrifice of their badges on 
the altar of the regency. But from fraud the pro- 
gress is easy to mountebankism, and from folly to 
faction. In the midst of this carnival of party suc- 
cess, perfidy began to fix its eye on darker objects ; 
murmurs were heard that were little short of treason, 
the key-note of rebellion was touched more than 
once in this chorus of new-born loyalty ; and in the 
wild resolutions of the Irish whigs, and their still 
wilder speeches, were first founded those just alarms, 
which predisposed the English cabinet to the calami- 
tous measure of the Union. 

But, whatever might have been the original plot 
of the drama, it finished in characteristic Uirlesque. 



1788.] THE king's illness. 165 

The last scene of the tragedy found a substitute in 
farce. The lord-lieutenant having naturally refused 
to make himself a culprit by forwarding the " reso- 
lutions," an embassage /rom the lords and commons 
was 'sent with them to London. The deputation 
reached London, and made their first bow to the 
prince, a week after the announcement of the king^s 
convalescence ! Thus vanished into thin air the 
fabric of place, pension, and general spoil, which 
patriotism had erected with such triumphant antici- 
pation. The rewards of the deputies were, a gracious 
answer from the prince, informing them that they 
were too late, and the shrinking thanks of the Irish 
parliament, conscious that it had committed an irrepa- 
rable folly, and trembling through all its limbs at the 
just indignation of the throne. 

But the first infliction was the laugh of the em- 
pire : caricatures of " the six deputies riding on bulls," 
and satirical squibs and verses of every kind, were 
poured upon this unhappy failure. Some of these 
sports of scorn may be still remembered. 

EPIGRAM.— The Bull-Riders. 

Though Pats are famed for sportive sculls, 

This feat all feats surpasses ; 
For, not content with breeding bulls, 

Those bulls are rode by asses. 

THE GLORIOUS HALF-DOZEN. 

Six rogues have come over our pockets to pick, 

And dispose of their second-hand ware ; 
To play the buflfoon, to jump, tumble, and trick. 

But they've come — the day after the fair. 

Productions like those are made only for the mo- 
ment; but one more, as giving the names of the 
commission, must be quoted. It is obviously founded 
on Horace's Ode, " Pastor quum traheret,^^ 



166 GEORGE THE FOtTHTH. [1788 



THE PROPHECY. 

When the packet o'er the tide 
Bore lerne's patriot pride^ 
Harry Grattan's delegates, , 
Pregnant with a nation's fates, 
Pondering all on bribes and places, 
Making all, all kinds of faces, 
Schemes of native thievery brewing, 
Scoundrels, made for fools' undoing ; 
While along the loaded deck 
Sickening lay the human wreck, 
Right beneath the pilot's nose 
From the wave a phantom rose ; 
BuH-necked, black-mouthed, water-bloated, 
Still buff- vested and blue-coated ; 
Round of belly, round of chin. 
Thus began the shape of sin. 

"Asses, from the land of asses, 
Ere your cargo this way passes, 
While your worships have an ear. 
Hear your true-blue Prophet, hear I 
Hear me, every party hack ! 
Scoffed at ye shall all come back, 
Scoffed at as the tools of tools, 
All incorrigible fools .' 

**Hear me, purse-bound, lack-brained Lein&ter. 
Model of an ancient spinster ; 
Hear me, mountebank O'Neill, 
Tied to every rabble's tail ; 
Hear me, Conolly I the prime 
Of talkers against sense and time ; 
Hear me, sullen Ponsonby ! 
Thou of the place-hunting ej'e ; 
Hear me, Stewart, of beaux supreme, 
Tliyself thy everlasting theme, 
Bold defier of the wave 
(Thine's a terra firrna grave) ; 
Hear me, simpering Charlemontj 
With thy Machiavellian front, 
With thy opera lisp and smile, 
Israelite that knows no guile ; 
Compound soft of softest cant, 
Faction's gentle figurant. 

** Hear me, dotards, one and all — 
Sudden scorn shall on you fall , 
Laughter follow on your track, 
Laughter drive you flying back , 
Scoffs ftom people, king, and prince! 
Till your ass-skin withers wince. 



1788.] THE king's illness, 16? 

Not a dinner for yoiir pains, 
Not a stiver for your gains ; 
Till, thougli naked, not ashamed, 
• All your patriot fires are tamed; 
Till your mob-bepelted souls 
Wish your senders at the poles. 
Curse the hour they first harangued. 
And long to see them drowned or hanged." 

. Then before their spell-bound view 
Dived the phantom buff and blue — 
Laughter from the Cambrian rocks 
Mingled with the name of Fox ; 
Laughter from the British main 
Came with clanks of lash and chain ; 
Laughter in the tempest's roar 
Rolled from cloud, and sea, and shore. 

The consternation of the ministerial deserters in 
Ireland was boundless, and for once they were not 
disappointed. They were cashiered in all directions. 
Office was cleared of every timeserver of the whole 
tribe ; and the minister was justly said to have 
" made more patriots in a day than patriotism had evei 
made in a year." Sheridan's brother Charles, the 
Irish secretary of war, was among the culprits, and 
was cast out like the rest. But his fall was soft- 
ened by some unaccountable job, which gave him a 
pension of 1200L a-year, with a reversion of 300/. to 
his wife ! 

In England the king's recovery broke up as rnany 
dreams of office as were ever engendered between 
vanity and selfishness. Opposition had cut royal 
patronage into suits of every shape. Every parti- 
san, and every partisan's partisan, was to be provided 
for ; and the whole loose and pauper mob who hang 
on the skirts of politics, were each to find a covering 
for his multitude of sins. To take the single in- 
stance of Sheridan himself; he was to have the 
treasurership of the navy ; an office totally unfit for 
his careless habits. But this was not the limij; ; his 
brother-in-law, Tickell, an idler, was to have a seat 
in parliament ; and his associate, Richardson, another 



168 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1795.' 

idler, was to have a commissionership of stamps. 
Who can regret that those caterpillars were shaken 
off the public tree ; or that the objects o£ a party, 
which thus linked itself with avarice and intrigue, 
were defeated? The man must be fertile in tears 
who could grieve that an association for the purposes 
of plunder should be deprived of the public spoil; or 
that mercenaries should be stripped of the honours 
due only to patriotism and virtue. 



CHAPTER IX. 

The Prince's Marriage. 

The regency question drove the prince from poli- 
tics. No experiment could have been more disheart- 
ening. Fond of popularity, he saw it crush his last 
hope ; relying on the wisdom of his friends, he saw 
their councils ignominiously baffled, their connexion 
threatened by personal jealousy, and the great anta- 
gonist of both prince and party raised into undisputed 
power ; while, attached to his royal father by duty, 
he found his personal conduct the object of reproof, 
and his defence answered only by more open dis- 
pleasure. 

The result was disastrous to himself, to the king- 
dom, and to the king. It abandoned him to pursuits 
still more obnoxious than those of public ambition. 
It encouraged his natural taste for those indulgences 
which, however common to wealth and rank, are in 
all their shapes hostile to the practical values and 
high-minded purposes of life ; and it embarrassed his 
circumstances, until, pressed by creditors, and en- 
tangled by a multitude of nameless perplexities, he 
suffered himself to be urged into a marriage, formed 



1795.] THE prince's marriage. 169 

without respect or attachment, and endured in bitter- 
ness and vexation until its close. 

It was said, that at this period a proposal was made 
to ministers by the prince to accept the viceroyalty 
of Ireland ; a situation for which he would have been 
highly fitted, by his attachment to its people, and his 
general knowledge of its habits and interests : but 
the proposal, if ever made, was discountenanced. 
An application was next forwarded to the king for 
military rank : but the prince still remained a colonel 
of dragoons, while all his royal relatives were ad- 
vanced to the highest stations of the service. Cha- 
grin might not unnaturally have seized upon the 
mind of any man thus in early life stopped in all his 
efforts for distinction ; and no trivial blame must fall 
upon the councils by which the heir of the crown 
was virtually consigned to either indolence or error. 

For some years he abjured all appearance of po- 
litical feeling. He received the nobility and public 
persons sumptuously ; but with something like a de- 
termination to forget on what political side they 
ranged. He spent the chief part of his time at 
Brighton ; came occasionally to Carlton House ; sig- 
nalized his presence by a ball or a dinner ; and then, 
having done his share as a leader of the fashionable 
world, galloped back to Brighton, and amused him- 
self with pursuits that cost less trouble. 

Here he was not companionless, though the times 
had changed in which his table was the scene of the 
highest discussions of public life. With political 
hope the leading names of opposition had disap- 
peared, and their places were filled up by individuals 
chiefly remarkable for their submission to the tastes 
of their royal entertainer, or their personal eccen- 
tricity. Occasionally guests of a higher rank ap- 
peared; and among those were the late Duke of 
Orleans, the Prince de Leury, and other foreign no- 
blemen. 

The Duke of Orleans had visited England some 
P 



170 OEORGE THfi FOURTH. [1795 

years before, nominally on a tour of pleasure, but 
more probably by an order from the French cabinet, 
which had already suspected him of sowing- disaffec- 
tion in the court. He had been summoned back to 
France by an order of the king-, after a few months' 
absence, and returned, laden with English fashions, 
and followed by a train of race-horses, English 
jockeys, and a whole travelling establishment ; which 
he displayed, to the horror of the ancient regime of 
jackboots and diligences ; to the infinite delight of 
the Parisians, who read liberty in this invasion of 
Newmarket caps and dock-tailed horses ; and to the 
universal popularity of the Anglomanie, which in the 
Parisian intellect implied English bootmaking, bet- 
ting, prize-fighting, and the constitution. 

In return, the duke had assisted the prince with his 
knowledge of play ; and considerable sums were lost 
at the Pavilion. From this, a transaction arose, in 
which, under the various names of a loan, a debt, 
and a present, the duke was said to have made an 
offer of a large sum to his royal highness : but the 
offer was finally declined, by the advice of Sheridan 
and the Duke of Portland. 

In 1789 the duke visited England for the last time. 
France was exhibiting symptoms of disturbance, 
which made his presence hazardous to the court; 
and under the pretext of a mission from the king, he 
was ordered to leave Paris. But the national as- 
sembly were already kings of France, and their pass- 
port too was necessary. It was at length granted ; 
with no slight astonishment that the leading regene- 
rator should leave his country at the moment when 
she was on the wing, ascending to the third heaven 
of pohtical perfection. But France had another race 
of kings, higher than even the national assembly, 
—the poissardes of Boulogne. Those legislators 
seized the royal envoy, nullified the king's commis- 
sion on the spot, put his passport in their pockets, 
and marched him to the hotel, v^^here they placed a 



1795.] THE prince's marriage. 171 

guard over him, until they should send a deputation 
from their own body to the national assembly. The 
deputation returned, bearing the national sanction. 
The fishwomen expressed themselves satisfied ; the 
prisoner was let loose, — fortunate if he had been 
taught by this example the madness of popular li- 
cense ; and was received in London with great dis- 
tinction by the prince and the chief nobility. 

The bewildered career and unhappy fate of the 
Duke of Orleans are now matter of history. He 
was born in a hazardous time for a man of weak un- 
derstanding, strong passions, and libertine principles. 
— The monarch but a grown child : the queen, esti- 
mable but imperious, full of Austrian " right divine," 
and openly contemptuous of the people : the court 
jealous, feeble, and finding no resource for its weak- 
ness but in obsolete artifice and temporary expe- 
dient : the nobility a mass of haughty idlers, a hun- 
dred and twenty thousand gamesters and intriguers, 
public despisers of religion and the common moral 
obligations by which society is held together; chiefly 
poor, and living on the mendicant bounty of the 
court; worthless consumers of the fruits of the earth, 
yet monopolists of all situations of honour and emo- 
lument ; and by their foolish pride in the most acci- 
dental of all distinctions, birth, — ^by their open mean- 
ness of solicitation for that last livelihood which a 
man of true dignity of mind would seek, a depend- 
ence on the public purse, — and by their utter useless- 
ness for any purpose but that of filling up the ranks 
of the army, — rendered at once weary of themselves 
and odious to the nation. But beyond those central 
projecting points in the aspect of France, those frag- 
ments of the old system of the monarchy, the politi- 
cian saw a wilderness of living waves, a boundless 
and sullen expanse of stormy passions, furious aspira- 
tions, daring ambition, and popular thirst of slaugh- 
ter ; a deluge, rising hourly round the final, desperate 
refuge of the state, and soon to overtop its last pinnacle. 



173 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1795. 

But the Duke of Orleans was not to see this con- 
summation. He returned to France ; was seized by 
the men of liberty; condemned without a hearing 
by the votaries of immaculate justice ; and murdered 
on the scaffold by the purifiers of the crimes of law- 
givers and kings. 

The son of that duke has now peaceably ascended 
the magnificent throne which dazzled the ambition 
of his father. Whether France will long suffer a 
king, may be doubtful. But, while his claim is that 
of the national choice, entitled, by an exertion of 
extraordinary courage, justice, and moderation, to 
the disposal of the throne, we must rejoice that 
France has obtained a man of virtue, and that such 
a man should be endowed with so illustrious an op- 
portunity of redeeming his name, and of spreading 
the benefits of wisdom and power to mankind. 

A remarkable personage visited England at the 
same time, the Due de Lauzun, the finished repre- 
sentative of the French noblesse of the higher order. 
Of great elegance of manners, and of striking talents, 
but utterly prodigal and unprincipled, he was the 
chevalier whom Grammont would have delighted to 
draw, if his pencil could have touched the man of 
fashion with a shade of republicanism. Lauzun re- 
mained only a few months in England ; but a French- 
man is a rapid pupil, and in those months he became 
the most matchless specimen of the Anglomanie that 
had ever captivated the glance of Paris. 

Yet one step more was necessary to perfection. 
He retired to Passy, a village in the suburbs, and 
there commenced philosopher. He had succeeded 
to the title of Biron, and was for a while the wonder 
of the pre-eminent sons of science and freedom, who 
enjoyed his classic banquets, and exulted in the ar- 
rival of the golden age. But the republic was now 
mounted on its car, and rushing, with fiery wheels, 
over the frontiers of rival states, and the necks of 
potentates and armies. Biron became an avowed 



1795. J THE prince's MAIIRLA.GE. 173 

republican, was placed at the head of an army, fought 
and conquered ; was suspected, was seized by the 
convention, and completed the course of a revolu- 
tionary general by dying on the scaffold. 

He finished his career in the dramatic style of his 
country, en Mros. Revolutionary justice suffered 
no stigma of the "law's delay;" and the ceremonial 
seldom consisted of more than the criminal's pro- 
nouncing his name, and the tribunal's ordering his 
execution. The scaffold followed the example of 
the tribunal, and the condemned were generally put 
to death within the next five minutes. In Biron's 
instance, there was the delay of a whole hour ; and 
he used it to exhibit the epicurean ease which dis- 
tinguished the wits and sages of the era. 

On returning to his dungeon, he ordered oysters 
and white wine. While he was indulging over this 
final meal, the executioner entered, to tell him that 
" the law could wait no longer." " I beg a thousand 
pardons, my friend," said the duke ; " but do me the 
honour to allow me to finish my oysters." The re- 
quest was granted. " But I had forgot," observed 
Biron : " you will have something to do to-day, and a 
glass of wine will refresh you : permit me to fill one." 
The offer was graciously accepted. " Again, I had 
forgot," added the duke ; " there is our mutual friend, 
the turnkey." The turnkey was called in; three 
glasses were filled ; the three were drunk off — a la 
sante ; and in a few minutes after, the head of this 
gay libertine, traitor, and philosopher was rolling on 
the scaffold. 

The prince's marriage now became the national 
topic. The Duke of York had already been married 
some years,* but was still childless : and the king 
naturally anxious to see an undisputed succession, 
and leave his descendants masters of the throne, 
strongly urged the heir-apparent to select a wife 

* OctolDer, 1791. 
P2 



174 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1795. 

from the royal families of Europe ; and thus give 
a pledge to the empire of that change of habits, and 
that compliance with the popular wish, which, in 
those days of revolution, might even be essential to 
the public safety. 

No advice could have been more startling. His 
royal highness had often declared, that he would not 
give up " his free, mihoused condition" for any wo- 
man on earth : and he had even peculiarly turned to 
scorn those forms of princely marriages, which pre- 
clude previous knowledge on both sides ; and avowed 
himself, in the plainest terms — a " rebel to royal 
matrimony." 

But the embarrassment extended further than the 
princely breast. The first announcement of the pos- 
sibility of his marriage threw the whole female world 
into confusion. Fashion trembled through all her 
thrones. In our present intangible state of female 
influence, it is hopeless to conceive the supremacy 
asserted by women of rank fifty years ago. Even 
our novelists, with all their eagerness to give pun- 
gency to the manners of the great, can find nothing 
for pubhc curiosity beyond the commonplace echo 
of an elopement, or the childish canvass for the en- 
tr^e of a ball-room. Our journals, the "brief ab- 
stracts and chronicles of the time," represent all 
women in the higher circles as giving head and heart 
to the domestic purpose of securing opulent alli- 
ances, the matrons for their daughters, and the 
daughters for themselves. But the fashion of the 
last century was of another mould. 

London then saw a constellation of female lumi- 
naries, any one of which would throw our modern 
stars into profound eclipse. Each had her peculiar 
source of homage. The Dutchess of Devonshire 
gave the most sumptuous entertainments, and by her 
elegance and accomplishment sustained a long reign. 
The Dutchess of Gordon, handsome in her youth, 
had become a bel-esprit when she ceased to be a 



1795.] THE prince's marriage. 175 

beauty ; and always said the cleverest, and often the 
keenest things, with the easiest air of any high-born 
wit since the days of him 

" Who never said a foolish thing, 
Nor ever did a v(?ise one." 

The Dutchess of Rutland, who, happily, still lives, 
and still gives evidence of that beauty which once 
made her the " rose of the fair state ;" was then, by 
universal acknowledgment, the loveliest woman of 
the English court; and completed the celebrated 
trio, to whom the first homage of every man who 
aspired to the praise of taste was paid, and of whom 
it was said in a popular epigram, — 

Come, Paris, leave your hills and dells ; 

You'll scorn your dowdy goddesses, 
If once you see our English belles, 

For all their gowns and boddices. 

Here's Juno Devon, all sublime ; 

Minerva Gordon's wit and eyes ; 
Sweet Rutland, Venus in her prime : 

You'll die before you give the prize. 

The age of English poetry had perished, and we 
were to wait long for its revival. But, in the inter ■ 
val, every one wrote verses ; and the essential tribute 
to a reigning belle was a poetic panegyric upon her 
attractions. If an English beauty could have been 
overwhelmed, like Tarpeia, by her ornamental tri- 
butes ; the women of rank of the last century must 
have died under a superabundance of verse. Fortu- 
nately, nothing is more evanescent : but an ode by 
Sir Hercules Langrishe, a popular member of the 
Irish house of commons, — a favourite every where, 
and familiar with all that life has of the graceful 
and the gay, is among the surviving examples of this 
playful courtesy. The subject 's not of the heroic 
order, — a gnat's stinging the lady. 



176 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1795. 

TO HER GRACE THE DUTCHESS OF RUTLAND 

As poor Anacreon bleeding lies 
From the first glance of Stella's eyes, 
Too weak to fly, ton proud to yield, 
Or leave an undisputed field ; 
He rallies, rests upon his arms, 
And reconnoitres all her charms. 
Vainly he fancies, that by peeping 
Through all the beauties in her keeping, 
He may, in such a store, collect 
The healing balm of one defect, 
One feeble point, one faulty spot, 
By Nature's forming hand forgot, 
Or left, in mercy, a defence 
Against her soft omnipotence. 
Which spurns philosopher nor sage, 
Nor tender youth nor cautious age. 
He viewed her stature towering high, 
The liquid lustre of her eye, 
The rosy beauties of her mouth 
Diffusing sweetness like the south; 
He viewed her whole array of charms, 
Her swan-like neck, her polished arms ; 
He looked through every rank and file, 
The look, the sigh, the grace, the smile, j 
No advantageous pass was lost. 
No beauty sleeping on its post ; 
But all was order, all was force, — 
A look was victory of course. 

At length an incident arose 
That flattered him with lesser woes : 
The bold intrusion of a fly 
Had closed the lustre of an eye, 
And given him hopes that, thus bereft 
Of half her splendour, what was left 
He might resist or else evade. 
Or cool his passion in the shade. 
But while he thrills beneath her glance, 
He sees another foe advance ; 
The snowy arm^s sublime display 
Was raised to chase the cloud away. 
He felt how frail is hope, how vain : 
The vanquished lustre came again ; 
The living ivorj'^ supplied 
The splendour which the eye denied. 
So Savoy's snowy hills arise, 
And pierce the clouds and touch the skies 
And scattering round the silver ray, 
Give adcjed brightness to the day. 

Thus disappointed in hie dream 
Of imperfection in her frame, 
The lover ventures to explore 
One final, fond expedient mora 



1795.] THE prince's marriage. 177 

" Must lovers' eyes be always blind,-~ 

Have I no refuge in her mind 1 

Can 1 no female error trace 

To heal the mischiefs of her face ; 

One tax, one countervailing duty, 

To balance her account of beauty ; 

One saving foible, balmy fault, 

One impropriety of thought, 

To lend its medicinal aid, 

And cure the wounds her eyes have made !" 

Presumptuous thought ! I viewed once more 
The blaze that dazzled me before, 
And saw those very eyes impart 
A soul, that sharpened every dart. 
With every rich endowment fraught, 
The tender care, the generous thought, 
The sense of each exalted duty. 
The beauty that was more than beauty ; 
The wish, on every smile impress'd, 
To make all happy, and one blest ! 
The whole was softness mixed with love, 
The arrow feathered from the dove. 

Finding no hope of safe retreat, 
I yield contented to my fate ; 
I unreluctant drag the chain 
And in the passion lose the pain ; 
Feel her sweet bondage all so light, 
Her fetters all so soft and bright, 
That, vain and vanquished, I must owii 
I never wish to lay them down. 
Nor longer struggle to be free : 
Such chains are worth all liberty ! 

The announcement of a stranger, who was to be 
higher than the highest of those glittering and impe- 
rious rulers, produced a universal tumult. But there 
were others, of inferior rank and more disputable 
merits, who had deeper reasons for alarm ; and pub- 
lie report gave them the discredit of a determined 
conspiracy against the peace and honour of the fu- 
ture Princess of Wales. 

Even in the purer circle of the court, discussions 
arose which boded ill for her tranquillity. The king, 
who was much attached to his sister, the Dutchess 
of Brunswick, had proposed her daughter, the Prin- 
cess Caroline Amelia Elizabeth ; and, in the first in- 
stance, had corresponded with the court of Bruns- 



178 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1795, 

wick on the subject, where the prospect was con- 
templated with exultation. The queen, not less at- 
tached to the honour of her own connexions, had 
proposed her niece, Louisa Princess of Mecklenburg, 
afterward so distinguished and unfortunate as the 
Queen of Prussia. Yet there was still a third to be 
conciliated, more interested and more reluctant than 
either, the future husband. But he had a pressure 
upon him which no resolution can finally resist : he 
was overwhelmed with demands upon his income ; 
his creditors were gathering round him again ; that 
querulous and persevering eagerness for royal anec- 
dote which had harassed so many of his earlier years, 
was again invading his private life with tenfold ani- 
mosity; and at last, in an evil hour, he gave way, 
and suffered himself to be announced as the suitor of 
the Princess Caroline. The king immediately sent 
a fonnal intimation of his wishes to the court of 
Brunswick, and the marriage was decided on. 

Still, every thing in this union seemed destined to 
be adverse. While the Duke and Dutchess of Bruns- 
wick were unmeasured in their delight at seeing the 
succession to the British throne in their family, and 
themselves the probable ancestors of a race of kings ; 
the princess was said to exhibit no trivial dislike to 
the match. Among the innumerable rumours which 
float in the atmosphere of courts on such occasions, 
it must be difficult to detect the truth ; but it was 
openly asserted, that she had already formed an at- 
tachment to an individual in the ducal service; and 
the following letter was published, purporting to be 
a declaration of her feelings to a German lady re- 
siding in England. 

" You are aware of my destiny. I am about to 
be married to my cousin, the Prince of Wales. I 
esteem him for his generosity, and his letters be- 
speak a cultivated mind. My uncle is a good man, 
and I love him much ; but I feel that I shall never 
be happy. Estranged from my connexions, friends. 



1795.] THE PRINCE S MARRIAGE* 179 

and all I hold dear, I am about to make a perma* 
nent connexion. I fear for the consequences. 

"Yet I esteem and respect my future husband, 
and I hope for great kindness and attention. But, 
alas ! I say sometimes, I cannot now love him with 
ardour. I am indifferent to my marriage, but not 
averse to it ; but I fear my joy will not be enthu- 
siastic. I am debarred from possessing the man of 
my choice, and I resign myself to my destiny. I 
am attentively studying the English language. I am 
acquainted with it, but I wish to speak it with 
fluency. I shall strive to make my husband happy, 
and to interest him in my favdur, since the fates 
will have it that I am to be Princess of Wales." 

Whether this letter be authentic or not, it is pro- 
bable that it gives a true transcript of this unhappy 
princess's mind. The prince's perplexities, too, 
might be less public, but they were not less trying 
and, by that strange balance which so much equal- 
izes the variety of human condition, there were pro- 
bably but few in England, even of " the waifs and 
strays of fortune," who would have had reason to 
envy the pomps and honours of two beings appa- 
rently placed on the golden summit of prosperity. 

But the prince's natural good-humour soon re- 
turned, and he submitted to necessity like a philoso- 
pher. The princess's portrait had been sent to him, 
and he made a point of praising it. On one occa- 
sion, he showed it to an intimate friend, and asked, 
with some seriousness, " What he thought of it ?" 
The answer was, " That it gave the idea of a very 
handsome woman." Some observations followed, 
in which the homely but expressive phrase of " buy- 
ing a pig in a poke" happened to escape. " How- 
ever," said the prince, after a pause, " Lennox and 
Fitzroy have seen her, and they tell me she is even 
handsomer than her miniature." 

The newspapers, which, of course, collect much 
detail that naturally soon perishes, gave long ac- 



180 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1795 

counts of the royal marriag-e, and are still the best 
authorities for the public impression at the time. 
One of those says : — " The Princess of Brunswick, 
to whom his royal highness is shortly to give his 
hand, is twenty-five years of age ; her person is very 
pleasing, and her accomplishments are exquisite. 

" The first thought of the prince's nuptials origi- 
nated some time ago with an exalted personage, 
who had the first interest in seeing the prince esta- 
blished ; and it was accordingly hinted to him, but 
in so delicate a manner as to leave it entirely at his 
option. Juvenile pursuits at that time suspended all 
further discourse about it ; till one day his royal 
highness, praising the person and accomplishments 
of the Princess Mary before the Duke of Clarence, 
the duke observed, she was very like the Princess 
of Brunswick, whom he had the honour of knowing 
and conversing much with. The prince grew more 
inquisitive upon the subject ; and the duke so satis- 
fied him in all particulars as to afford him the high- 
est gratification. 

" The affair seemingly dropped for this time ; but 
on the morning of a late great gala at Windsor, he 
mentioned it to a great personage, who was de- 
lighted with the proposal ; it was instantly commu- 
nicated to the queen, who felt equal satisfaction : it 
was then agreed to keep the matter entirely out of 
the cabinet till it was in some train of forwardness, 
which was strictly complied with ; and the first no- 
tice the ministers of state had of it, was an official 
notice to prepare for the embassy the forms, requi 
sitions, &c. 

" Presents and marriage favours, to a great 
amount, are preparing for the princesses, &c., as 
well as marks of his royal highness's remembrance 
to several persons of both sexes about the court. 

" The Princess of Wales (we may now call her 
so) is esteemed one of the best harpsichord per- 
formers amongf the loyal families on the continent. 



1795.] THE prince's marriage. 181 

The prince being passionately fond of music, har- 
mony will of course be the order of the day. 

" Carlton house is furnishing for the reception of 
the royal pair, with all possible magnificence and 
despatch. An estimate has been made of the whole ; 
and our readers will form some idea of the expen- 
sive grandeur of this new establishment, when they 
are informed that the Princess of Wales's dressing- 
room alone amounts to twenty-five thousand pounds. 

" There has been made up, intended as a present 
from the Prince of Wales to the princess when she 
arrives, a most magnificent cap, on which is a plume 
in imitation of his highness's crest, studded with 
brilliants, which play backwards and forwards in the 
same manner as feathers, and have a most beautiful 
effect. It is now at a banker's in Pall Mall, carefully 
locked up. 

" The betrothed consort of the Prince of Wales is 
of a middling stature, and remarkably elegant in her 
person. Her appearance at court is majestic, but 
accompanied with a sweetness and affability of man- 
ners which rivet the admiration of all who behold 
her. Her eyes are intelligent, her countenance 
highly animated, and her teeth white and regular. 
Her hair, of which she has an amazing quantity, is 
of a light auburn colour, and appears always dressed 
in a simple but elegant style. Her taste in every 
part of dress is equally graceful ; so that there is no 
doubt but she will, on her arrival in this country, be 
the standard of fashionable dress and elegance." 

The king's speech at the opening of the session 
of 1795, gave the first official knowledge of the in- 
tended marriage. 

" I have," said his majesty, " the greatest satisfac- 
tion in announcing to you the happy event of the 
conclusion of a treaty of marriage of my son, the 
Prince of Wales, with the Princess Caroline, daugh- 
ter of the Duke of Brunswick. The constant proofs 
of your affection for my person anii family persuade 

Q 



183 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1795. 

me that you will participate in the sentiments I feel 
on an occasion so dear to my domestic happiness ; 
and that you will enable me to make provision for 
such an establishment as you may think suitable to 
the rank and dignity of the heir-apparent to the 
crown of these kingdoms." 

The princess at length left Brunswick, attended by 
an escort, and the principal persons of the court. — 
Those who were inclined to discover the future in 
omens, found ill fortune predicted in every point of 
her journey. It was commenced in the depth of 
winter ; and within a few days was stopped by the 
sudden indisposition of the Dutchess of Brunswick, 
who had intended to accompany her daughter to the 
shore. The embarkation was to have taken place at 
Helvoetsluys ; but before the princess could reach 
t)snaburg, it was announced to her that her route 
must be changed, as the fleet had left the Dutch 
coast. She then had no resource but to take up her 
abode in Hanover. At last, on the arrival of the 
squadron off Cuxhaven, she embarked,* after having 
spent three months of a German winter on her jour- 
ney. Even her voyage was a specimen of the in- 
clemency of our climate; and fogs, billows, and 
gales were her first salutation to the British shore. 

The princess arrived at Greenwich on Sunday at 
noon ;t and the virtue of the congregations was said 
to have been severely tried by the shouts and tumult 
in the streets. In some instances curiosity overcame 
decorum, and the preacher was left with a thinned 
audience. After a short stay at the house of the 
governor, Sir Hugh Palliser, the princess proceeded 
to London, attended by her ladies, and among the 
rest Lady Jersey ! The roads and bridges were covered 
with people, who received her with acclamations ; and 
in this species of triumphal entry she passed along until 
she reached her apartments at St. James's. The Prince 
of Wales, always observant of courtesy, waited on her 

*March28 t^ - t April 5 



1795.] THE prince's marriage. 1^3 

instantly, with all the visible ardour of a^ lover, com- 
plimented her on her aiiival, her appearance, and her 
knowledge of English, and asked permission to dine 
with her. In the evening the royal family visited 
her, and the king was animated in his congratula- 
tions. The party did not break up till near midnight. 
It was the English family party which his majesty 
loved ; and his honest and hospitable joy communi- 
cated itself to all round him. 

Among princes, the hopes and fears of the passions 
are brief; and his royal highness had but three days 
for romance ; for, on the third* from the arrival of 
the princess, he was summoned to St. James's to be 
married ! 

The ceremony had every adjunct of royal mag- 
nificence : the bride came, covered with jewels, with 
a diamond coronet on her brow, and attended by four 
daughters of nobility as bridemaids. Lady Mary Os- 
borne, Lady Charlotte Spencer, Lady Caroline Vil- 
liers, and Lady Charlotte Legge. The prince next 
appeared, in the collar of the garter, and attended by 
two unmarried dukes, Bedford and Roxburgh.-^ 
Through the whole ceremony the king's gratification 
was palpable. He peculiarly attended to the bride ; 
and when the archbishop asked the usual question, 
" Who giveth this woman to be married to this man ?" 
his majesty went hastily forward to the princess, and 
taking her hand in both his, affectionately gave her 
to her husband. 

But another ceremonial of a sterner nature was to 
come. The prince had acceded to the royal com- 
mands, on a promise that his debts should be dis- 
charged. The king's natural and becoming wish to 
see a change in the habits of his heir, the peculiar 
importance of rescuing royalty from public imputa- 
tion in a period when the revolutionary spirit was 
seeking offence against all thrones, and the humane 

* April 8. 



184 GEORGE THE FOTJRTH. [1795. 

necessity of relieving the multitude of creditors who 
might be ruined by delay, had urged him to the 
promise. The statement of the debt was laid upon 
the table of the house of commons. It was formi- 
dable. 

Debt on various securities, and bearing interest .... Z500,571 19 1 

Tradesmen's bills unpaid 89,745 

Tradesmen's bills and arrears of establishment, from 
lOth of Oct. 1794, to April 5th, 1795 52,573 5 3 

Z642,890 4 4 

The only palliative of this expenditure is, that his 
royal higlmess knew but little of its extravagance, 
and had probably not so much actual enjoyment of it 
as many an English gentleman with a tenth of his 
income. He was surrounded by individuals whose 
interest it was to keep him in the dark relative to his 
own affairs; in his rank, he could scarcely be ex- 
pected to inquire very deeply into household details, 
or to scrutinize tradesmen's bills ; and those to whom 
the duty naturally fell, had sagacity enough in their 
OAvn objects to take care that even if he had scruti- 
nized them, he should have been not the less plun- 
dered. One instance of this system of wholesale 
spoliation may serve as an example of the rest : his 
farrier's bill, for horse medicine and shoeing, was 
40,000Z. 

The condition on which the prince had yielded to 
the royal will was now to be performed; and the 
proposal for liquidating his debts was ushered in by 
one of the minister's ablest speeches.* The king 
had sent a message to the legislature, calling on it 
to enable him to form an establishment for the newly 
married pair ; but adding, that the first point was to 
relieve the prince from his embarrassments, as until 
then he could derive no advantage from the settle- 
ment. The message stated also, that the only mode 

* April 27, 1795 



1795.] THE prince's marriage. 185 

which the king contemplated of paying the debt 
was, by deducting a portion of the prince's proposed 
income, and by handing over the revenues of the 
dutchy of Cornwall for a certain period for the use of 
the creditors ; finally, a pledge was to be given against 
all future recurrence of debt. 

The measure was necessary; but no time could 
have been more unfortunate for the demand. The 
nation was fretted with the failures of the French 
war, and was doubly irritated at the taxes which 
every session imposed ; angry opinions on govern- 
ment had been eagerly spread through the nation ; 
the imbecility of the Bourbons was made a charge 
against all sovereigns ; the daring doctrines, seconded 
by the memorable military successes, of the new re- 
public, were already influencing opinion in all coun- 
tries; and England seemed on the verge of some 
great and fatal change. The prince's embarrass- 
ments now gave a new topic to the declaimers, and 
the debates in the house were long and acrimonious. 
On the motion for the committee on the message, a 
formidable array of the county members appeared 
in opposition; and Stanley, member for Lancashire, 
adverted in strong terms to the former message, in 
1787, and the promises then made relative to the 
prince's obligations. But there was no remedy ; and 
the minister, with whatever reluctance, was com- 
pelled to persevere. 

The heads of the proposed establishment were — 

Annual income of the prince, exclusive of the dutchy of 

Cornwall, to Le raised to Z125,000 

Jewels and plate for the marriage 28,000 

For finishing Carlton House 26,000 

The revenue of the dutchy was 13,000/. The ac- 
cumulation during the prince's minority, from 1768 to 
1783, was 233,764/. ; and for the liquidation of the 
debt, a sum of 78,000/. a-year was to be appropriated. 
To this proposal were appended clauses providing 

Q2 



186 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1795. 

for the future punctual discharge of the arrears, and 
for making over Carlton House to the crown, with 
the furniture, as an heir-loom. A jointure of 50,000/. 
a-year was settled on the princess. 

The discussion continued nearly three months be- 
fore the public, and during the whole time the feehngs 
of party within and without the house were in a per- 
petual ferment. The Duke of Clarence, who had 
seldom taken a share in the debates, attracted public 
notice by the generosity and boldness with which he 
adopted the cause of the innocent sufferer, the 
princess of Wales. 

"Whatever may be thought," said he, "of the 
stipulations for the payment of the debts, there is at 
least one individual who ought not to be exposed to 
this harsh and stem inquisition, — a lovely and amia- 
ble woman, torn from her family; for though her 
mother is his majesty's sister, she must still be said 
to be torn from her family, by being suddenly sepa- 
rated from all her early connexions. What must her 
feelings be, from finding her reception in this country 
followed by such circumstances, when she had a 
right to expect every thing befitting her rank, and 
the exalted station to which she was called ]" 

The princess herself, unused to inquiries into the 
conduct of courts, was alternately indignant and de- 
jected, declaring, that " she would rather live on 
bread and water in a cottage, than have the cha- 
racter and conduct of the royal family, and especially 
of her husband, thus severely investigated." Oppo- 
sition, disheartened by perpetual defeat, was now 
almost reduced to Fox and Sheridan ; who, however, 
with more than their usual prudence, pointed out the 
only way of rational extrication ; and with even more 
than their usual boldness, assailed higher authority 
than that of ministers. But Sheridan, animated by 
every motive that could kindle his passions or his 
genius, — attachment to the prince, vexation at the 
turn of fortune which had cast him immeasurably 



1795.] TiiE prince's marriage. 187 

beyond the hope of public honours, and the still 
stronger offence of being charged with sharing the 
plunder of the prince's income, eclipsed himself. 
The house was kept in a state of unwearied admira- 
tion by the brilliant variety of powers which this ex- 
traordinary man displayed night after night ; in the 
midst of a life of that alternate embarrassment and 
excess, dreamy indolence and exhausting luxury, — 
that ague of the mind, which most rapidly exhausts 
and emasculates the intellectual frame. 

The fragments of those speeches which still re- 
main can only do injury to the reputation of the 
great orator. Yet, shattered as they are, they now 
and then exhibit some trace of the master hand. 

"I disdain," said he, "all this trifling and quib- 
bling with the common sense of the nation. Let the 
people not be deceived by our taking the money out 
of their pockets as a royal income, and paying it 
back as a royal debt. To-night it is not my inten- 
tion to vote either way. This seems to surprise 
some gentlemen opposite ; but, to those who make 
up their minds on all questions before they come into 
the house ! some surprise may be natural at my not 
making up my mind after I am in it. 

" The debt must be paid immediately, for the dig- 
nity of the country and the situation of the prince. 
He must not be seen rolling about the streets as an 
insolvent prodigal. But the public must not be bur- 
dened with the pressure of a hair, in affording him 
that relief. 

"In the course of these discussions, gentlemen 
have applied strong language to the conduct of an 
illustrious prince. But there are other high and 
illustrious characters, who, in future discussions, 
must be told as plainly what the public have a right 
to expect from them, and what their conduct ought 
to have been on the present occasion, however un- 
gracious the task may be." 

The plan in Sheridan's contemplation was, that an 



188 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1795. 

advance should be made from the privy purses of the 
king and queen, and that the incomes of the sinecure 
places should be thrown in. 

" The king's privy purse vras 60,000/., the queen's 
50,000/.; and all their houses and paraphernalia 
were now finished and furnished. The first and most 
natural feeling of a parent would be to make some 
sacrifice to retrieve the imprudence of a son." He 
then pounced upon the sinecures ; — " places which 
add to neither the dignity of the crown nor its 
strength. Let a committee of trustees be appointed, 
in whom might be placed the sinecure revenues after 
the death of their present holders. Posterity would 
lookback with gratitude to the arrangement, and with 
wonder that such places ever existed. This would 
be the way to make our constitution stable, and to 
prevent the wild system of Jacobinism from under- 
mining or overturning it. While we were spilling 
our blood and wasting our money in support of con- 
tinental monarchy, this would be a rational resource ; 
and prove that monarchy, or those employed under it, 
could show examples of self-denial, and do something 
for the benefit of the people. This would add lustre to 
the crown ; unless, indeed, ministers might think that 
it shone with lustre in proportion to the gloom that 
surrounded it, and that a king is magnificent as his 
subjects become miserable ! 

— " There is one class who love the constitution, 
but do not love its abuses. There is another who 
love it, with all its abuses. But there is a third, a 
large and interested party, among whom I do not 
hesitate to place his majesty's ministers, who love 
it, for nothing but its abuses! But let the house, 
the best part of our constitution, consider its own 
honour. Let us destroy the sinecures. Let us build 
the dignity of the prince on the ruins of idleness and 
corruption, and not on the toils of the industrious 
poor, who must see their loaf decreased by the dis» 
charge of his encumbrances." 



1795.] THE prince's marriage. 189 

To the charge of sharing in the prince's expendi- 
ture he gave the most distinct denial. "He had 
never accepted any thing, not so much as a present 
of a horse. He scorned the imputation, and would 
leave it to defeat itself." He repulsed with quick 
sarcasm the attacks made on him in the course of the 
debates by the minor antagonists, who had rashly 
volunteered this proof of their ministerial devotion. 
Colonel Fullarton had said, in a long and desultory 
speech, that the prince's councils were secretly guided 
by Sheridan. After contemptuously retorting the 
charge, — " I, the secret counsellor of the prince ! I 
have never given his royal highness a syllable of 
advice, in which I did not wish it were possible to 
have the king standing on one side, and the people 
of England on the other ;" he proceeded to repay the 
colonel : — 

" As to certain portions of the honourable gentle- 
man's speech, some of the sentences, I actually be- 
lieve, no gentleman in this house understood, nor 
could understand ; and the only solution of the pro- 
blem is, that somebody must have advised him to 
prepare a speech against what he conjectured might 
be said to-night. He had rifled the English language 
to find out proverbs and trite sayings ; and had so 
richly enveloped his meaning in metaphor, and em- 
bellished it with such colouring, as to render it to- 
tally unintelligible to meaner capacities." 

RoUe had called him to order. He did not escape. 
Sheridan told him, " that he was not at all surprised 
to hear himself called to order by that honourable 
gentleman ; but he should have been very much sur- 
prised to hear any reason for the call from that ho- 
nourable gentleman." Even to Pitt, Avho had, on 
one occasion, made no other reply to his speech than 
moving to adjourn, he flung down the glove. — "I 
make no comment on the indecency of moving to 
adjourn, when the public relief is the topic. To 
desire the gentlemen on the opposite side to make 



190 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1795. 

provision for the prince by a reduction of useless 
places, would be to amerce themselves. For my 
part, I never thought them capable of any folly of 
the kind." 

The prince at length interposed, and by Anstruther, 
his solicitor-general, sent a message to the house, 
declaring "his acquiescence in any arrangements 
which it might deem proper with respect to his in- 
comej and its appropriation to the payment of his 
debts. He was perfectly disposed to make any 
abatement in his personal establishment that was 
considered necessary." The princess coincided in 
the message ; and the proceedings were closed by 
three bills.* The 1st. For preventing future Princes 
of Wales from incurring debts. The 2d. For grant- 
ing an establishment to the prince. And the 3d. 
For the princess's jointure. Commissioners were 
next appointed for the examination of the debts. 
The creditors were paid by debentures, with interest 
on their claims ; and the term of nine years was 
fixed for the final payment. Many of the claims 
were rejected as groundless, many were largely re- 
duced as exorbitant, and a per centage was taken off 
the whole. Thus ended a proceeding in which the 
minister's sagacity had failed of satisfying the nation, 
the creditors, or the prince. Sheridan's advice would 
have led to a course more generous and more popu- 
lar. The debt ought not to have been brought before 
2he nation. 

*Jttne24tb, 17d&. 



1796.] THE ROYAL SEPARATION. 101 



CHAPTER X. 

The Royal Separation. 

In the period of the prince's retirement, before 
and after his marriage, several incidents occurred 
which brought him, from time to time, into the pre- 
sence of the public. Some of them exhibited that 
want of caution which was the source of his chief 
vexations through life ; but all bore the redeeming 
character of his original good-nature. 

Prize-fighting had become a popular, and even a 
fashionable amusement, by the patronage of the no- 
bility and the Duke of Cumberland. Brutal as the 
habit is, and inevitably tending to barbarize the peo- 
ple, it was for a while considered a peculiar feature 
of British manliness. The prince adopted this pa- 
triotic exhibition, and was honoured accordingly ; but 
one display, at which a wretched man was beaten 
to death before his face, gave him so effectual an 
impression of championship, that, with honest indig- 
nation, he declared " he would never be present at 
such a scene of murder again." 

The Lennox duel not less exhibited his good feel- 
ing. The offence received by the irritable colonel 
was of the most trivial nature. The attempt on the 
life of the son of his king, and who might himself yet 
be his king, was a public crime ; and if Colonel Len- 
nox had killed the Duke of York, nothing but the 
mercy of that duke's grieved parent could have saved 
him from an ignominious death. But the result 
was fortunately bloodless, and the king seemed to 
think it a matter of etiquette to overlook the 
crime. But the Prince of Wales was unable to 



192 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1796. 

restrain his feelings ; and on the first meeting- with 
Colonel Lennox at court, he expressed his displea- 
sure in the most pointed manner, consistent with the 
presence of royalty.* 

The transaction with Jefferys, the well-known 
jeweller, was one of those instances which made 
the prince's connexion with Mrs. Fitzherbert so 
perpetual a source of disaster. Nothing could be 
more trifling than the transaction itself — a loan of 
1600^, which was repaid at the promised time; but 
the circumstances under which it was borrowed, 
■ — to save Mrs. Fitzherbert from an immediate pro 
cess at law by a creditor, who refused to look upon 
her in any other light than " as a woman of no rank 
or consideration in the eye of the law, as to personal 
privilege ;" in other words, who was prepared to 
throw public contempt upon the tie by which the 
lady professed to be bound to his royal highness ; — 
at once gave great pain to the prince, and supplied a 
topic of peculiar scandal to his enemies. 

Jefferys was obviously a person unfit for royal 
confidence. The prince had thanked him, in his 
good-natured language, for the service ; and the jew- 
eller's vanity was instantly inflamed into the most 
extravagant expectations of patronage. The prince 

* The story was thus told in the newspapers. Col. Lennox, to the 
surprise of every one, had appeared at the ball given at St. James's on • 
the king's birth-day (1789). " The colonel stood up in the country dance 
with Lady Catherine Barnard. The prince, who danced with his sister, 
the princess royal, was so far down the set, that the colonel and Lady 
Catherine were the next couple. The prince paused, looked at the colo- 
nel, took his partner's hand, and led her to the bottom of the ddnce. 
The Duke of Clarence followed his example ; hut the Duke of York 
made no distinction between the colonel and the other gentlemen of the 
party. When the colonel and his partner had danced down the set, the 
prince again took his sister's hand and led her to a seat. Observing this, 
the queen approached the prince, and said, 'You are heated, sir, and 
tired. I had better leave the apartment and put an end to the dance,' 
' I am heated,' replied the prince, ' and tired, not with dancing, but with 
a portion of the company;' and emphatically added, ' I certainly never 
will countenance an insult offered to my family, however it may be re- 
garded by others.' The prince's natural gallantry next day offered the 
necessary apology to Lady Catherine Barnard, and he ' regretted that he 
should have caused her a moment's embarrassment.' " 



1796.] THE ROYAL SEPARATION. 193 

was as destitute of power as any gentleman in the 
kingdom ; but he gave him all that he could give, 
the order for the marriage jewels, which amounted 
to 64,000/. Jeflferys had, in the mean time, followed 
his fortunes in other ways : he had become a mem- 
ber of parliament, Coventry having the honour to re- 
turn him ; and he had at length thrown up trade, and 
become a solicitor for place. The commissioners 
for the payment of the prince's debts attempted to 
deduct ten per cent, from his bill for the jewels. 
But this he resisted, and, by the help of Erskine, ob- 
tained a verdict in Westminster Hall for the full 
amount ; which, however, he complained, was but 
partly paid. Thus he continued for years, pamphlet- 
eering, and appealing to the prince for compensation 
which he had no power to give, and forcing the 
royal name before the public in the most perplexing 
and unfortunate manner.* 

The royal marriage was inauspicious ; and it was 
soon rumoured, that the disagreements of habit and 
temper, On both sides, were too strong to give any 
hope of their being reconciled. Of an alliance con- 
tracted with predilections for others existing in the 
minds of both parties, the disunion was easily fore- 
seen ; a partial separation took place, and the tongue 
of scandal availed itself fully of all its opportu 
nities. 



* The prince's sale of his stud, and retirement from Newmarket, was 
a public topic for some time. This whole affair also is almost too 
trifling for record. — A horse belonging to his stud ran ill on one day, 
when heavy bets had been laid upon liis winning. But he ran well on 
the next day, when heavy bets had been laid on his losing. Chifney, 
the jockey, was immediately assailed by the losers on both occasions, 
as having plundered them; but he made an affidavit that he had won 
only 201. The Jockey Club sat in judgment on the case, and disbeliev- 
ing the jockey, ordered that he should ride there no more. The prince, 
believing him, looked on the decision as an injustice to his servant, and 
as an offence to himself: he instantly withdrew from the course; and 
feeling for the state to which Chifney must be reduced^ gave him a 
yearly allowance. It was impossible to believe that the prince had been 
privy to the trick, if trick there were. The charge was soon and totally 
abandoned. 

R 



194 GEORGE THE FOURTH* [1796 

Lady Jersey has been so distinctly charged with 
taking an insidious share in this separation, and with 
personal motives for taking that share, that the pub- 
lic voice must be acquiesced in, peculiarly as no 
defence was offered by herself or her husband. The 
charges were repeated with every aggravation, yet 
those noble persons suffered them to make their un- 
obstructed way through society ; much more to the 
scorn than to the surprise of the country. 

The princess had no hesitation in requiring Lady 
Jersey's dismissal from the household. Her first 
demand was that this woman should not be suffered 
to appear at the table, when the prince was not pre- 
sent. The request was not complied with. The 
princess next applied to the king. His majesty im- 
mediately interfered, and directed that Lady Jersey 
should " come no more into waiting," and should be 
given up. Half of this order was complied with : 
her ladyship was dismissed from her waiting ; but 
she was not given up. 

Nevei was there a more speaking lesson to the 
dissipations of men of rank, than the prince's in- 
volvements. While he was thus wearied with the 
attempt to extricate himself from Lady Jersey's irri- 
tations, another claimant came ; Mrs. Fitzherbert 
was again in the field. "Whatever might be her 
rights, — since the royal marriage, at least — the right 
of a wife could not be included among them ; but 
her demands were not the less embarrassing. A 
large pension, a handsome outfit, and a costly man- 
sion in Park Lane, at length reconciled her to life ; 
and his royal highness had the delight of being 
hampered with three women at a time, two of them 
prodigal, and totally past the day of attraction, even 
if attraction could have been an excuse, and the 
third complaining of neglects, which brought upon 
him and his two old women a storm of censure and 
ridicule. But the whole narrative is painful, and 
cannot be too hastily passed over. 



1796.] THE ROYAL SEPARATION. 195 

On the 7th of January, 1796, the Princess Char- 
lotte was born. The usual officers of state were in 
attendance, and the prince was in the state chamber, 
awaiting the event with great anxiety. The royal 
infant was christened, on the 11th of February, at 
St. James's, receiving the names of Charlotte from 
the queen, and of Augusta from the Dutchess of 
Brunswick; the sponsors were their majesties, with 
the princess royal as proxy for the dutchess. 

A considerable number of addresses from public 
bodies were presented on this fortunate occasion. 
But the corporation of London contrived to take of- 
fence at his royal highness's expressing that, from 
the reduction of his establishment, he must be con- 
tent with receivmg a copy of their address, instead 
of the deputation. 

Birch, one of the common council, moved, upon 
this, " That the court could not, consistently with 
its dignity, suffer the compliment to be paid other- 
wise than in the usual form." The prince sent for 
the lord mayor, and stated, in apology, his reasons 
for the refusal. The city was considered to have 
pushed punctilio as far as it could go : for the con- 
gratulations of the two houses of parliament had 
been already presented in private on the same ground, 
—the state of the prince's household. 

During the dissensions of Carlton House, the king 
paid the most marked civilities to the Princess of 
Wales, visited her frequently, made her presents, 
wrote letters to her, and on all occasions evinced his 
determination to protect her under the difficulties of 
her circumstances. But, unfortunately, she was to- 
tally deficient in prudence : a violent temper and a 
feeble understanding laid her at the mercy of the fe- 
male intriguers who surrounded her, with the two- 
fold malice of personal rivalry and defeated ambi- 
tion. In defiance of all warnings, she still spoke with 
open scorn of all whom she suspected of conspiring 
against her ; and there were few whom she did not 



196 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1796. 

suspect. Her opinions even of the royal family 
were highly sarcastic, and she had the folly to put 
those opinions on paper, in her correspondence with. 
the court of Brunswick. 

At length a whole packet of those angry commu- 
nications was unaccounted for. They had been in- 
trusted to a Dr. Randolph, a clergyman, who was 
going to Germany; and they never reached their 
intended destination. But it was equally clear that 
they had reached another ; and the princess publicly 
declared that they had been intercepted by Lady 
Jersey, for the purpose of being scattered among the 
royal family. Dr. Randolph was, of course impli- 
cated in the charge ; but the Doctor had no more to 
say than that, having changed his mind as to his 
German journey, he had returned the letters to the 
princess by the usual Brighton conveyance. The 
inquiry was hotly urged by the public, with the strong- 
est expressions of perfidy, corruption, and intrigue 
against the parties; until Lady Jersey tardily at- 
tempted to vindicate herself at the Dr.'s expense, 
by the following letter :— 

« Pall Mall, 
" Sir, — The newspapers being full of accusations 
of my having opened a letter either to or from her 
royal highness the Princess of Wales, and as I can- 
not in any way account for what can have given rise 
to such a story, excepting the loss of those letters 
with which you were intrusted last summer, I must 
entreat that you will state the whole transaction, 
and publish the account in the newspapers you may 
think fit. Her royal highness having told me, at the 
time when my inquiries at Brighton, and yours in 
London, proved ineffectual, that she did not care about 
the letters, they being only letters of form, the whole 
business made so little impression on me, that I do 
not even recollect in what month I had the pleasure 
of seeing you at Brighton. 1 think you will agree 



1796.] THE ROYAL SEPARATION. 197 

with me, that defending myself from tht charge of 
opening a letter, is pretty much the same thing as if 
I were to prove that I had not picked a pocket ; yet, 
in this case, I believe it may be of some use to show 
upon what grounds so extraordinary a calumny is 
founded. As I cannot wish to leave any mystery 
upon this aflfair, you are at liberty to publish this let- 
ter if you think proper to do so." 

The matchless equanimity with which husbands 
of rank sometimes listen to domestic imputations, 
which would rouse humbler men into a burst of 
honest resentment, may be among the privileges of 
their condition ; but Lord Jersey, at length, seemed 
to have made the discovery that a wife's reputation 
has something to do with a husband's honour ; and 
his lordship came forward in the correspondence 
with the harassed doctor. 

" Sir, — Lady Jersey vinrote to you early in the last 
week, requesting that a full statement from you of 
all that passed relating to the packet of letters be- 
longing to her royal highness the Princess of Wales, 
might appear in public print. To that letter she has 
received no answer from you, nor have I learned 
that any such publication has appeared. The delay 
I have been willing to attribute to accident : but it 
now becomes my duty to call upon you, and I do re- 
quire it of you, that an explicit narrative may be laid 
before the public : it is a justice she is entitled to, a 
justice Lady Jersey^s character claims, and which 
she has, and which you have acknowledged she has 
a right to demand at your hands. Your silence upon 
this occasion I shall consider as countenancing that 
calumny which the false representations of the busi- 
ness have so shamefully and unjustly drawn upon 
Lady Jersey. I am, &c." 

Dr. Randolph finally came before the genera] 
R2 



l98 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1796 

tribunal as a contributor to this singular exhibition ; 
and discussed the matter, in a letter to her ladyship, 
in full form. 

"Madam, 

" I need not recall to your ladyship's recollection 
the interview I had with the princess at Brighton: 
when she delivered to me the packet in question, all 
her attendants in waiting were, I believe, present, 
and the conversation generally turned upon the va- 
rious branches of her august family, and the altera- 
tion I should find in them after an absence of ten 
years. This interview, if I am not mistaken, took 
place on the 13 th of August ; and after waiting by 
her royal highness's desire till the 14th, when the 
prince was expected from Windsor, to know if he 
had any commands to honour me with, I had no 
sooner received from Mr. Churchill his royal high- 
ness's answer than I departed for London, with the 
intention of proceeding to Yarmouth. 

" On my arrival in town, finding some very un- 
pleasant accounts of the state of Mrs. R.'s health, I 
took the liberty of signifying the occurrence to her 
royal highness, annexing to it at the same time a 
wish to defer my journey for the present, and that her 
royal highness would permit me to return the packet, 
or allow me to consign it to the care of a friend who 
was going into Germany, and would see it safely 
dehvered. To this I received, through your lady- 
ship, a most gracious message from her royal high- 
ness, requesting me by all ineansto lay aside my in- 
tentions, and return the packet. In consequence of 
such orders, I immediately went to Carlton House, 
to inform myself by what conveyance the letters 
and parcels were usually sent to Brighton, and was 
told that no servant was employed, but that every 
day they were, together with the newspapers, com- 
mitted to the charge of the Brighton post-coach from . 



1796.] THE ROYAL SEPARATION. 199 

the Golden Cross, Charing Cross. On the*^ sub- 
sequent morning, therefore, I attended at the Golden 
Cross, previous to the departure of the coach, and 
having first seen it regularly booked, delivered my 
parcel, enclosing the princess's packet, addressed to 
your ladyship at the Pavilion. Immediately after- 
ward I set out for Bath, and had scarcely been a 
fortnight at home, when, to my surprise and mortifi- 
cation, I received the following letter from your lady- 
ship, dated Brighton, Sept. 1 : — 

" ' Sir, — In consequence of your letter, I have had 
her royal highness the Princess of Wales's com- 
mands to desire, that as you did not go to Brunswick, 
you should return the packet which she had given you. 
I wrote accordingly, about a fortnight ago. Hei 
royal highness not having received the packet, is 
uneasy about it, and desires you to inform me how 
you sent the letters to her, and where they were 
directed. If left at Carlton House, pray call there, 
and make some inquiries respecting them.' 

" To which letter of your ladyship I then returned 
the following answer : — 

" * Madam, — I know not when I have been more 
seriously concerned than at the receipt of your lady- 
ship's letter, which was forwarded to me this morn- 
ing. The morning I left town, which was on the 
20th of August, I went to the Brighton post-coach, 
which I was told at Carlton House was the usual 
conveyance of the princess's papers and packets, and 
booked a parcel, addressed to your ladyship, at the 
Pavilion, enclosing the letters of her royal highness. 
I have sent to a friend in London by this night's post, 
to trace the business ; and will request your ladyship, 
to let your servants call at the Ship, the inn I believe 
the coach drives to at Brighton, to make inquiry 
there, and to examine the bill of parcels for Thurs- 



200 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1796, 

day, the 20th August. If this prove not successful, 
I shall hold it my duty to return to town, and pursue 
the discovery myself. I shall not be easy till the 
packet is delivered safe ; and trusting that this will 
soon be the case, I remain, &c." 

Public animadversion was inflicted with equal 
severity on all the individuals concerned in this luck- 
less intrigue. The doctor was sternly asked — ^liow 
he could have treated the trust of a person of the 
distinction, and mider the peculiar circumstances, of 
the princess, with such apparent nonchalance ? Why, 
at the easy distance of London from Brighton, he 
had not thought proper to restore the letters to her 
own hands % Why he had lingered so long in offer- 
ing his explanation, when the first and most natural 
impulse of any man publicly lying under so stinging 
a charge, would have been to cast it from him 
without a moment's delay, and, never desist until his 
vindication was complete, and the charge was sub- 
stantiated against the true criminals? Finally, it 
was demanded, why the people at the coach-office 
were not brought forward to show what had actually 
become of the packet, and into whose hands at 
Brighton it had been delivered 1 

Lady Jersey was asked — how she could have suf- 
fered so long a period as from the 20th of August to 
the 4th of September to elapse without making any 
inquiry for the fate of a packet which she was told 
was to be returned, which was directed to herself, 
and which it was her duty to see delivered to the prin- 
cess ? The total improbability of its being lost was 
argued from the usual care in those matters, and from 
the attention that would be naturally paid to packets 
for the royal household. 

But here discovery closed; the only clear fact 
being, that .the letters never returned to the writer. 
Her royal highness could scarcely be supposed to 
preserve silence on a subject which, however inno* 



1796.] THE ROYAL SEPARATION, 201 

cent, had so much the air of infamy. Her indig- 
nation was unbounded ; she pronounced that there 
was but one name of scorn for all the agents; 
and unhesitatingly declared that, from circum- 
stances, and even phrases, which elapsed in con- 
versation, her correspondence must have been be- 
trayed by some malignant individual into the hands 
of her enemies. 

His majesty, with that kindliness which formed so 
large a portion of his character, made one attempt 
more to put an end to those painful disputes ; but the 
highest life is, in essentials, like the lowest ; and the 
hazard of interfering in matrimonial differences, 
even though the mediator were a king, was palpably 
shown in the still wider alienation of the parties. 
After a short period a separation was proposed by 
the prince, and the princess expressed her readi- 
ness to accede to the measure, with only the added 
condition, that the separation should be perpetual. 
To this his royal highness finally agreed, in the 
following note : — 

" Madam, — Ks Lord Cholmondeley infonns me 
that you wish I should define,.in writing, the terms 
upon which we are to live, I §hall endeavour to ex- 
plain myself upon that head with as much clearness 
and with as much propriety as the nature of the 
subject will admit. Our inclinations are not in our 
power ; nor should either of us be held answerable 
to the other, because nature has not made us suitable 
to each other. Tranquil and comfortable society is, 
however, in our power ; let our intercourse, there- 
fore, be restricted to that, and I will distinctly sub- 
scribe to the condition which you required, through 
Lady Cholmondeley, — that even in the event of any 
accident happening to my daughter, which I trust 
Providence in its mercy will avert, I shall not infringe 
the terms of the restriction by proposing, at any pe- 
riod, a connexion of a more particular nature. I shall 



202 GEORGE THE FOrRTH. [1796. 

now finally close this disagreeable correspondence, 
trusting that, as we have completely explained our- 
selves to each other, the rest of our lives will be 
passed in undisturbed tranquillity. 

•. " I am. Madam, with great truth, 
" Very sincerely yours, 

" GEORGE P. 
" Windsor Castle, April 30, 1796." 

To this communication, the princess, after some 
interval, replied : — 

" Sir, — The avowal of your conversation with 
Lord Cholmondeley neither surprises nor offends me ; 
it merely confirmed what you have tacitly insinu- 
ated for this twelvemonth. But after this, it would 
be a want of delicacy, or rather an unworthy mean- 
ness, in me, were I to complain of those conditions 
which you impose upon yourself. I should have 
returned no answer to your letter, if it had not been 
conceived in terms to make it doubtful whether this 
arrangement proceeds from you or from me. You 
are aware that the honour of it belongs to you alone. 
The letter which you announce to me as the last, 
obliges me to communicate to the king, as to my 
sovereign and my father, both your avowal and my 
answer. You will find enclosed a copy of my letter 
to the king. I apprize you of it, that I may not incur 
the slightest reproach of duplicity from you. As I 
have at this moment no protector but his majesty, I 
refer myself solely to him on this subject ; and if my 
conduct meet his approbation, I shall be, in some 
degree at least, consoled. I retain every sentiment 
of gratitude for the situation in which I find myself, 
as Princess of Wales, enabled by your means to in- 
dulge in the free exercise of a virtue dear to my 
heart — charity. It will be my duty, likewise, to act 
upon another motive — that of giving an example of 
patience and resignation under every trial. 



1796.] THE ROYAL SEPARATION. 203 

" Do me the justice to believe that I shall never 
cease to pray for your happiness, and to be, your 
much devoted " CAROLINE. 

" May 6, 1796." 

The king still interposed his good intentions, and 
desired that the princess should, at least, reside wi- 
der the same roof with her husband. She had apart- 
ments in Carlton House, while the prince spent his 
time chiefly at Brighton. But Charlton, a village 
near Blackheath, was finally fixed on for her resi- 
dence ; and there, with the Princess Charlotte, and 
some ladies in attendance, she lived for several 
years. 

In this whole transaction the prince was culpable. 
With habits of life totally opposite to those of do- 
mestic happiness, he had married for convenience ; 
and, the bond once contracted, he had broken it for 
convenience again. Following the fatal example of 
those by whom he was only betrayed, he had disre- 
garded the obligations fixed upon him by one of the 
most important and sacred rites of society and reli- 
gion ; and without 8iny of those attempts " to bear 
and forbear," and to endure the frailties of temper 
as well as the chances of fortune, which he had 
vowed at the altar, he cast away his duties as a toy 
of which he was tired ; and thus ultimately rendered 
himself guilty of every error and degradation of the 
unhappy woman whom he had abandoned. 

After a seclusion of ten years, the princess came 
again before the world. In 1804, her royal husband 
had insisted on the necessity of withdrawing the 
Princess Charlotte from her superintendence ; but 
the king was prompt in exhibiting his protection, 
and, after some correspondence, he took the guar- 
dianship upon himself. 

But the rumours which had produced this discus- 
"sion at length assumed shape in more formidable 
charges, which the prince, by the advice of Lord 



204 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1796 

Thurlow, imbodied and laid before his majesty. A 
committee,* consisting of Lords Erskine, Grenville, 
Spencer, and EUenborough, examined the papers ; 
which accused the princess of guilty intercourse 
with the late Sir Thomas Lawrence, Captain Manby, 
Sir Sidney Smith, and others; but stating Sir Sidney 
to be the father of a child by her. 

The report of the committee fully exculpated her 
royal highness of crime, simply objecting — " care- 
lessness of appearances," and " levity" in the in- 
stance of certain individuals. The king upon this 
declared her conduct clear, and ordered a prosecu- 
tion for perjury to be instituted against Lady Dou- 
glas, the wife of an officer of marines, who had taken 
advantage of her hospitality to excite suspicions 
which might have brought the princess to the scaf- 
fold. The child was fully proved to be the son of a 
poor woman of the name of Austin, in Blackheath. 
Lady Douglas was covered with obloquy ; and her 
husband, who appears to have been passive on the 
occasion, was so deeply affected by the public scorn 
that he was said to have died of a broken heart. 

His majesty carried on the triumphant vindication 
' to the last ; gave the princess apartments in Ken- 
sington palace, and directed that she should be re- 
ceived at court with peculiar attention. She ap- 
peared at the next birth-day ; and so strong was the 
national feeling, even in those ranks where it is eti- 
quette to suppress emotion, that as her royal high- 
ness passed through the crowd she was received 
with a universal clapping of hands ! 

Fortunate for her, if that day had taught her the 
safety of confiding herself and her cause to a gene- 
rous people; doubly fortunate for her, if she had 
for ever shunned the contamination of that foreign 
residence, and those foreign manners, which are 
alike pestilent to the honour of man and the vir- 
tue af woman. 

•May 29, 1806. 



1803.] THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 205 



CHAPTER XI. 
The French Revolution, 

The French Revolution was the oflfspring of infi- 
delity. The tyranny of Louis the Fourteenth, one 
of those monarchs whom Providence gives in its 
wrath to nations destined to fall, had expelled Pro- 
testantism by the revocation of the edict of Nantes, 
in 1683. The first punishment of this act of con- 
summate treachery was a general war, which broke 
down the military character of France, extinguished 
its alliances, devastated its provinces, and sent the 
gray hairs of the persecutor to the grave, loaded 
with useless remorse, with the scorn of his people, 
and the imiversal disdain of Europe. 

But the sterner punishment was to come, in the 
"^degeneracy of the national religion. From the hour 
in which Protestantism was exiled, the Gallican 
church ran a race of precipitate corruption. It had 
lost the great check ; and it cast away at once its 
remaining morals, and its literature. The Jansen- 
ists, a feeble reflection of Calvinism, were assailed 
by the Jesuits, the concentrated subtlety and fierce- 
ness of popery. But the struggle between the do- 
mineering and the weak always excites the sym- 
pathy of man ; and the whole intelligent body of 
France were summoned by the contest to examine 
into the rights of both: they were found equally 
groundless. The arguments of the Jesuits were 
the dungeon and the sword. The arguments of 
the Jansenists were pretended miracles, the hy- 
steric follies of nuns, and the artificial enthusiasm 
of hirelings and impostors. Common sense turned 
from both the controversialists with equal scorn. 

S 



206 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [l803» 

The Jesuits finally trampled down their adversa- 
ries ; but they had scarcely time to feel their triumph 
when ruin fell upon themselves. Their ambition had 
prompted them to the lofty insolence of mastering 
the thrones of Europe. Conspiracy and assassina- 
tion were the means. Kings at length took the 
alarm ; and by a simultaneous resolution the Jesuits 
were overthrown, amid the general rejoicing of man- 
kind. 

But when the national eye was no longer distracted 
by the minor conflict of the sects, it was raised with 
new-born astonishment to the enormous fabric of the 
Gallican church itself. All France suddenly rang 
with one uproar of scorn and abhorrence at the in- 
ordinate power, the shameless corruption, the con- 
temptible fictions, and the repulsive mummeries of 
the establishment. Like the prophet, the people had 
been led within the curtains of the dark chambers, and 
seen the secret abominations of the shrine ; but not 
with the righteous indignation of the prophet, but 
with the malignant joy of accusers who triumphed 
in their power of blackening all religion with the 
smoke of its abuses, they proclaimed the discovery 
to the world. 

It is not to be forgotten, as an illustration of one 
of the greatest moral truths, that the French church 
found that guilt is weakness. It was utterly unequal 
to face the day of peril. It still had, hung up in its 
halls, the whole consecrated armour in which it once 
defied the hostility of kings and people, the sword 
with which it had cloven down the diadem, and the 
shield with which it had blunted, for ages, every lance 
of the chivalry of freedom. But the nerve and mus- 
cle that might have borne them were long withered 
by indolence and vice. The " falchion of Scander- 
beg was there, but where was the arm of Scander- 
beg?" The merciless warrior was now the "lean 
and slippered pantaloon;" while his assailant had 
started ijp from the serf into the strong-limbed savage, 



1803.] THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 207 

wild with insolent revenge, and ravening for blood 
and plunder. 

It is among the most memorable facts of intel- 
lectual decline, that of the forty thousand clergy of 
France, not one man of conspicuous ability was 
roused by the imminent danger of his church. Like 
a flock of sheep, they relied on their numbers ; and 
the infidel drove them before him like a flock of 
sheep. While the battlements of their gigantic 
church were rocking in every blast, there was no 
sign of manly precaution, none of generous self-ex- 
posure for the common cause, and scarcely any even 
of that wise suspicion which is the strength of the 
weak. They took it for granted that the church 
would last their time, and were comforted. 

The pride of the day was distinction in literature ; 
but the whole ecclesiastical body of France saw the 
race run, without an effort for the prize. They sat 
wrapped in their old recollections, on the benches of 
the amphitheatre, and looked on, without alarm, 
while a new generation of mankind were trying 
their athletic limbs, and stimulating their young am- 
bition, in the arena where they had once been unri- 
valled. Raynal, and the few clerics who distin- 
guished themselves by authorship, were avowed 
deists or atheists; and ostentatious of their com- 
plete, if not contemptuous, separation from the esta- 
blishment. 

The last light of ecclesiastical literature had glim- 
mered from the cells of Port Royal ; but, with the 
fall of the Jansenists, " middle and utter darkness" 
came. During half a century no work of public 
utility, none of popular estimation, none of genius, 
none which evinced loftiness of spirit, vigour of un- 
derstanding, or depth of knowledge had been pro- 
duced by a churchman. ' 

The consequence was mevitable and fatal. The 
old awe of the church's power was changed into con- 
tempt for its understanding. Ten thousand rents 



208 GEORGE THE FOXTRTH. j 1803. 

were made in the fabric, still they let no light upon 
the voluntary slumberers within. The revolution- 
ary roar echoed through all its chambers, but it stirred 
no champion of the altar. The high ecclesias- 
tics relied upon their connexion with the court, their 
rank, and the formal homage of their officials; 
shields of gossamer against the pike and firebrand of 
the people. The inferior priesthood, consigned to 
obscurity, shrank in their villages into cumberers of 
the earth, or were irritated into rebels. The feeble 
contracted themselves within the drowsy round of 
their prescribed duties ; the daring brooded over the 
national discontents and their own, until they heard 
the trumpet sounding to every angry heart and form 
of ill in France, and came forth, a gloomy and despe- 
rate tribe, trampling their images and altars under 
foot, and waving the torch in the front of the grand 
insurrection. 

The partition of Poland, in 1773, had insulted the 
public honour and the Christian feeling of Europe. 
No act of ambition had ever sprung more directly 
from the spontaneous evil of the human heart. The 
destruction of an impotent throne, and the havoc of 
a helpless nation, were destitute of all the ordinary 
pretexts of state necessity. The country poor, the 
people half barbarian, the government already pow- 
erless for all objects of aggression, Poland had long 
been incapable of giving rise to fear ; but it excited 
the deadliest and most unrelenting passion of all 
that make a serpent's nest of the hiunan heart — covet- 
ousness. Prussia, Russia, and Austria entered into 
the foulest conspiracy against a nation on record, 
and tore Poland limb from limb. But while the blood 
of her unfortunate people was still red upon their 
hands, they were to be punished by the aggression 
of a power unheard of in the history of vengeance, 
the impetuous power of popular phrensy ; France, 
bursting from her old dungeon, and wild, furious, 
and revengeful, as ever was unchained madness, — at 



1803.] THE PRKNCH REVOLUTION. 209 

once inflicting agonies on lierself, and destruction on 
all in her path, — was let loose against them, a naked 
shape of evil, l3randishing its fetters, and spreading 
terror and desolation through the world. 

Christianity was maligned for the guilt of the 
royal conspirators against Poland. But the three 
were open infidels ; Frederic from his selfishness 
and perfidy, Catherine from her personal profligacy, 
and Joseph from his frigid metaphysics and perhaps 
disordered mind. But the charge came in the exact 
time to give the last sting to the growing hostility of 
the continent against sceptre and shrine. The short 
interval of quiet that followed the partition was only 
a preparative for that accumulation of calamity 
which France was to bring upon mankind; a cataract 
of living fire, checked on its height for the moment, 
only to rush down with irresistible ruin. 

France first cleared herself of the encumbrances 
of her government and priesthood; tore to the 
earth palace and monastery, chateau and chapel; 
mowed down, with a desperate hand, her nobles and 
her clergy, and tossed their remnants to all the 
winds of heaven; and then sent out her fourteen 
armies to lay waste every surrounding state ; the 
new Saracens of Europe, carrying their doctrine at 
the sword's point, and demanding that all should be 
converts or captives, — republicanism the policy and 
the religion of mankind. 

It was in no presumptuous desire to guide the 
wrath of Heaven, that men looked for some terrible 
retribution on the conspirators against Poland ; nor 
was it without that awe, in which the religious mind 
listens while the thunders of eternal justice are roll- 
ing above the world, that they saw a providential 
vengeance in the prostration of the three guilty 
kingdoms ; in the fugitive monarchs, broken armies, 
and subjugated capitals of Prussia, Russia, and 
Austria. But the work bore all the evidences that 
establish to the human understanding the agency of 

S2 



210 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1803. 

a mightier will than of man, — ^the sudden perplexity 
of counsel — the sudden disunion of interests — the 
defeat without a cause — ^the loss of the. race to the 
swift, and of the battle to the strong ; while, on the 
side of France, all the elements of ruin seemed to 
assume a new nature, and coalesce into strength and 
victory. Rude ignorance did the work of know- 
ledge ; national bankruptcy, of wealth ; insubordina- 
tion, wild as the waves, was more vigorous than dis- 
ciplme ; and the general upbreaking of society, the 
sword at the throat, the scaffold in the streets, fa- 
mine and feud, unhoused beggary, and the hideous- 
ness of civil bloodshed, combined and shaped 
themselves into a colossal power, that had but 
to advance its foot against the strongest bulwarks 
of the continent, and see them crumble into dust 
and ashes. 

The conduct of England in this great crisis was 
worthy of her virtue and her wisdom. For some 
years, a large mass of the people had seen nothing 
in the progress of the revolution but an advance to 
rational freedom. The fall of the Bastile was, un- 
questionably, an achievement honourable to young 
liberty ; for, with a Bastile still frowning over him, 
no man could feel himself in the possession of those 
rights, without which the highest station of life is 
but a more conspicuous slavery. But when France 
plunged from legitimate victory into the guiltiest 
license, — ^when she mixed the cup of freedom with 
blood, and, not content with intoxicating herself 
with the draught, offered it to the lip of the base 
and sanguinary in all nations ; then England dis- 
dained the alliance, interposed her strength be- 
tween the ferocity of the republic and human nature, 
and stood in the breach for the cause of God and 
man ! 

The declaration of war was one of those decided 
measures by which the character of the English 
minister was stamped for boldness and sagacity. 



1S03.] THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 211 

He had ijot rashly solicited it; and now, when its 
.expediency was clear, he prepared for it with all the 
resources of his great mind. He long had more 
than suflEicient grounds to justify the sternest retalia- 
tion on the republic; seizures of ships, confisca- 
tions of property, and those innumerable minor in- 
juries to the allies of England, which power in the 
hands of the mean loves to commit against the 
helpless. But the open effort to excite rebellion 
within the realm ; the affiliated societies, the corres- 
pondence with the crowd of demagogues, whose ob- 
scurity did not disgust the haughty embrace of re- 
publicanism, high as it held itself above the kings 
of Europe ; and, more than all, the pledge to revolu- 
tionize the world, were unanswerable justifications 
of hostility. 

At length, the unprovoked attack on Holland, an 
ally whom we were bound to protect, and whose fall 
would supply a fleet and a station for invading the 
British Isles, compelled the decision between a ha- 
zardous war and a dishonourable submission. The 
choice was no longer doubtful ; war was proclaimed 
in the midst of national exultation. And the first 
blow that was struck transmuted the popular discon- 
tent into the generous symapthy of Englishmen with 
the public cause. England purified herself every 
moment more and more from the principles of re- 
publicanism, and she found the way of honour the 
way of safety. The great pirate that had hoisted 
the signal of rapine and slaughter against all na- 
tions, shrank from an encounter with her stately 
force ; roved the globe for easier spoil ; and when, 
at last, in its vanity and arrogance, it came fairly 
into confhct with her, found itself crushed by her 
first broadside. 

In 1803, it was announced to the French army 
that England was to be invaded. An immense force 
was marched to the shores of the Channel, fleets 
were collected — ^transports were built — and, to make 



212 GEORGE THE FOtJRTHi [l803. 

Victory secure in the eyes of the soldier, the tutelar 
genius of France, the son of Fortune, Napoleon the 
''invincible," was to take the command. In the 
preparations for military triumph, civil benevolence 
too was not forgotten. The forms of the republic 
still lived among the fond recollections of the French 
slave. Napoleon himself was but a Jacobin upon a 
tlu"one ; and the consummate charm was given to 
the plan of invasion, by the promise of a republican 
constitution on the model of the days of Robespierre. 
England was to acquire new opulence from general 
confiscation, liberty from French free-quarters, and 
regeneration from universal chains. Of this re- 
public. Sir Francis Burdett had the burlesque honour 
to be, in the judgment of Napoleon, " the fittest man 
in England" to fill the presidential chair ! 

But nothing less than miracle will ever make a 
foreigner, and of all foreigners a Frenchman, capable 
of understanding the English character. Foreign 
life is essentially theatrical ; the streets are a tran- 
script of the stage. There must be, in all things, a 
false vividness, an abruptness, an artificial force ; or 
life and the business of life loses its interest in the 
national eye. The sober vigour and noiseless reso- 
lution of the Englishman would be looked upon as 
altogether loss by the foreign craving for perpetual 
excitement ; and Napoleon made but the common 
mistake of his subjects, in conceiving that men 
could not love their country without harangues, and 
civic processions, and triumphal arches, and the fop- 
peries of heroes and patriots glittering in the paint 
and tinsel of the stage. 

But in England, if an insane passion for repub- 
licanism had ever existed, it had now been cooled 
by experience ; or its chief exhibitors had been 
wisely and indignantly sent, by the national justice, 
where they could harm nothing but themselves. 
Rebellion had been stripped and shorn ; and could 
now show its head only to bring down the ridicuk 



1803.] THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 213 

of the empire. Even the race of the philosophers 
had dwindled away, from the bold clamourers against 
every wholesome institution of the country, and every 
natural feeling of the human heart, into a meager 
muster of clubbists, the pauperism of literature, 
giving symptoms of existence only by some ob- 
scure production, to which even the virulence of its 
principles could no longer attract the general eye. 
But while those men and their followers were 
ejected, like culprits driven to some barren shore to 
glean their subsistence from the defying soil and in- 
clement sky, and dream of future luxuiy and revenge 
in the wilderness ; the power and cultivation of the 
great empire that had cast them out were rising to 
their height. A succession of unexampled naval 
victories at once showed where the true defence of 
England lay, and spread the national glory through 
the world. The British fleet solved the famous pro- 
blem of the ancient legislators, — " How to make a 
state a conqueror, without making the conqueror 
itself a slave." In all the ancient and modern 
governments, the soldier had recoiled upon his 
country, and overwhelmed the citizen. But the na- 
tional and peculiar force of England precluded all 
hazard to national freedom, while it bore the most 
irresistible force against the enemy. Victory fol- 
lowed the career of the British fleet, upon her broad- 
est wing. 

But the war had done more than show the intre- 
pidity of our fleets and armies ; it'had effected the 
stiU nobler service of totally separating the British 
mind from the pollutions of the continent : even the 
imitations of foreign manners had become obsolete; 
the fantastic coxcombry that has been again intro- 
duced among us by the degenerate portion of our 
higher ranks, and those diplomatic loungers who 
wear out their languid and contemptible existence in 
awkward attempts to attain the ease of foreign pro- 
fligacy, was then to be suffered no longer : the con- 



214 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1803S. 

duit for the flow of French and Italian mountebankism 
into England was cut off. Those un-English speci- 
mens of travel, who had plagued and infested the na- 
tion for a century, who 

-" Had wandered Europe round, 



And gathered every vice on Christian ground, — 
Seen every court, heard every king declare 
His royal sense oi° operas, and the fair," 

were laughed out of society, — ^were consigned, like 
the tawdry suits of the past age, to the dust and 
moths, of which alone they were worthy ; the monde 
perruquiere, as Voltaire named them, were brushed 
away before the foot of a manly generation, and 
England was herself again. 

But if Napoleon miscalculated the feelings of the 
British people, no man could have more rapidly fur- 
nished himself with the means of discovering his 
error. The taunt of invasion showed him of what 
materials the English mind was made ; its grave love 
of country, its patient courage, its solemn and gene- 
rous conviction how much better it is to die in arms 
than live a slave. The taunt was as the sound of a 
trumpet to the empire : the whole population offered 
itself as one man : all professions, all classes, men 
of all diversities of political opinion, were prepared 
with the sacrifice of their lives. Five hundred thou- 
sand volunteers came forward in arms, ready to be 
followed by ten times the number, if a foreign foot 
had dared to insult the shore. And in this most 
magnificent exhibition of the strength of freedom, 
there was nothing that could degrade the scene. In 
the popular consciousness of irresistible power, 
there was no alloy of popular violence ; no insubor- 
dination in a countless host, whose will must have 
been law ; no bitterness against rank, where the force 
was gathered from the humblest conditions of so- 
ciety; no attempt at national spoil; no political 
clamour, where the voice of the infinite multitude 



1603.] THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 215 

might have instantly overwhelmed the voice of the 
constitution. The reason was, that the heart was 
sincere. The cause of their free country was at 
once the impulse, the guide, and the deliverance . 
they followed it, as the tribes followed the fiery pillar 
in the wilderness ; and giving themselves wholly to 
its high leading, they passed triumphantly through 
straits and dangers among which no other people 
could tread and live. 

The volunteer corps were chiefly headed by the 
gentlemen and nobles of highest consideration in 
their neighbourhood. Among the crowd of public 
persons, Pitt was colonel of the Cinque Port volun- 
teers; and the Duke of Clarence commanded a 
corps near his seat, Bushy, to whom he made a 
Spartan speech : — " My friends, wherever our duty 
calls, I will go with you, fight with you, and never 
come back without you !" The Prince of Wales 
took a peculiar interest in this little band, and pre- 
sented it with a pair of colours, which he gave with 
a feeling and animated compliment to their loyalty 
and discipline. 

But in this national crisis he justly felt that the 
people required something more than approval, from 
a prince in the prime of life, and who had the first 
interest in the defence of the throne. He had, long 
before this period, felt the offence of being thrown 
into the background, while all his relatives were in 
the front, and occupying high opportunities of public 
service. He now again applied for some military 
rank which would enable him to stand prominently 
before the public eye, and show that he too had the 
heart of an Englishman. 

But his request was not to be granted. It is diffi 
cult to conceive the political grounds of this refusal. 
The popular feeling demanded that the prince should 
exhibit a portion of that manliness which was then 
glowing in the breast of every subject of the empire. 
Compliance would have given an additional grace to 



216 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1803, 

royalty, m its day of trial; it would have supplied 
the prince with a motive for generous and patriotic 
exertions, which might have restored the old ties be- 
tween him and the higher classes of the English mind ; 
and if actual public danger were to be encountered, 
it must have assisted the general cause, by ability 
and ardour which awaited only the occasion to dis- 
tinguish themselves. The prince, even in the luxury 
of his life, had made himself master of the details 
of military science to an unusual degree. No colonel 
in the service kept his regiment in higher discipline; 
no officer could manoeuvre a regiment better; and it 
was acknowledged, among military men, that there 
were few finer displays than that of a field-day of 
the corps, with the prince at their head. 

The remark of a distinguished general officer, who 
was on the ground on one of those occasions, was, 
" that no adjutant of ten years' standing could have 
done it better in every point." The prince was fond 
of military reading: he was acquainted with the chief 
authorities on the science ; and he had often declared, 
that if he had his choice among all the ways of 
serving his country, it would have been to serve her 
as a soldier. He even went further ; and it was the 
opinion of those who were admitted to his confi- 
dence, that if the alternative lay between the suc- 
cession to the throne and a military command, he 
would then have gladly given up the crown for the 
sword. But even in this cherished and natural de- 
sire, iie was to have another instance of the mortifi- 
cations that were to pursue him through life. 

He first made his proposal, through Mr. Addington, 
in the following manly letter: — 

"JwZy 18, 1803. 

"Sir,— When it was officially announced to the 

parliament that the avowed object of the enemy was 

a descent on these kingdoms, it became obvious that 

the circumstances of the times required a voluntary 



1803.] THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 217 

tender of our services. Ai:ijinated by the same spirit 
which pervaded the nation at large, conscious of the 
duties which I owed to his majesty and the country 
I seized the earhest opportunity to express my desire 
of undertaking the responsibility of a military com- 
mand. I neither did nor do presume on supposed 
talents, as entitling me to such an appointment ; my 
chief pretensions are founded on a sense of those 
advantages which my example might produce to the 
state, by exciting the loyal energies of the nation, 
and a knowledge of the expectations which the pub- 
lic have a right to form, as to the personal exertions 
of their princes .at a moment like the present. The 
more elevated my situation, in so much the efforts of 
zeal should become greater. I can never forget that 
I have solemn obligations imposed upon me by my 
birth, and that I should ever show myself foremost in 
contributing to the preservation of the country. No 
event of my life can compensate me for the misfortune 
of not participating in the honours and dangers which 
await the brave men destined to oppose the invader." 

This letter remained unanswered. After a week, 
the prince repeated his proposal, v/ith an expression 
of surprise at the minister's neglect. Mr. Adding- 
ton's answer was a brief note, that the prince was 
referred to his majesty's refusal of similar applica- 
tions in former years ; and that his majesty's opinion 
being fixed, no further mention could be made to him 
on the subject. 

The minister had now discharged himself of the 
responsibility ; but his royal highness felt that he had 
a public interest in making a still higher appeal ; and 
he submitted his claims to the king, in the letter from 
which an extract is given : — 



" I ask to be allowed to display the best energies 
of my character, to shed the last drop of my blood 



218 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1803, 

in support of your majesty's person, crown, and dig- 
nity ; for this is not a war for empire, glory, or domi- 
nion, but for existence In this contest, the lowest 
and humblest of your majesty's subjects have been 
called on; it would, therefore, little become me, 
who am the first, and who stand at the very footstool 
of the throne, to remain a tame, an idle, and a life- 
less spectator of the mischiefs which threaten us, 
unconscious of the dangers which surround us, and 
indifferent to the consequences which may follow. 
Hanover is lost, England is menaced with invasion, 
Ireland is in rebellion, Europe is at the foot of France. 

"At such a moment, the Prince of Wales, yield- 
ing to none of your subjects in duty, — to none of 
your children in tenderness and affection, — presumes 
to approach you, and again to repeat those offers 
which he has already made through your majesty's 
ministers. A feeling of honest ambition, a sense 
of what I owe to myself and my family, and, above 
all, the fear of sinking in the estimation of that gallant 
army which may be the support of your majesty's 
crown and my best hope hereafter, command me to 
persevere, and to assure your majesty, with all hu- 
mility and respect, that, conscious of the justice of 
my claim, no human power can ever induce me to 
relinquish it. Allow me to say, sir, that I am bound 
to adopt this line of conduct by every motive dear to 
me as a man, and sacred to me as a prince. Ought 
I not to come forward in a moment of unexampled 
difficulty and danger ? Ought I not to share in the 
glory of victory, when I have every thing to lose by 
defeat ? Tlie highest places in your majesty's ser- 
vice are filled by the younger branches of the royal 
family ; to me alone no place is assigned ; I am not 
thought worthy to be even the junior major-general 
of your army. 

" If I could submit in silence to such indignities 
I should, indeed, deserve such treatment, and prove, 
to the satisfaction of your enemies, and my own 



1803.] THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 219 

that I am entirely incapable of those exertions which 
my birth and the circumstances of the times pecu- 
liarly call for. Standing so near the throne, when I 
am debased, the cause of royalty is wounded. I 
cannot sink in public opinion, without the participation 
of your majesty in my degradation ; therefore, every 
motive of private feeling and public duty induces 
me to implore your majesty to review your decision, 
and to place me in that situation which my birth, the 
duties of ray station, the example of my predeces- 
sors, and the expectations of the people of England, 
entitle me to claim." 

Public attention had been strongly fixed on the 
prince during the progress of this transaction ; and 
from the innumerable rumours which were propa- 
gated by his friends and enemies, it became of im- 
portance to him, that he should be enabled to bring 
his whole conduct on the occasion before the empire. 
The king, at least, gave him no cause to complain 
of delay. Nothing could be more prompt, nor more 
peremptory, than his majesty's answer;— 

" My dear Son, — Though I applaud your zeal and 
spirit, in which I trust no one can suppose any of 
my family wanting, yet, considering the repeated 
declarations I have made of my determination on 
your former applications to the same purpose, I had 
flattered myself to have heard no further on the 
subject. Should the implacable enemy succeed so 
far as to land, you will have an opportunity of show- 
ing your zeal at the head of your regiment. It will 
be the duty of every man to stand forward on such 
an occasion; and T shall certainly think it mine to 
set an example, in defence of every thing that is 
dear to me and my people. 

" I ever remain, my dear son, 

" Your most aifectionate father, 

« GEORGE R." 



220 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [l803. 

Application was thenceforth at an end; but the 
prince addressed a strong vindication of his motives 
to his majesty; and after some correspondence with 
the Duke of York, whom he had hastily conceived to 
be the king's adviser on the occasion, and a remon- 
strance on his being omitted in a list of military pro- 
motions towards the close of the year, he at length 
submitted to a necessity which perhaps no subject 
in the empire could have felt with more pain. A final 
note to the minister put this offended feeling in the 
strongest light. The reports of invasion had been 
loudly renewed, at a time when the prince was 
known to be preparing to spend the winter at Brigh- 
ton, a point which must have been considerably ex- 
posed, in the event of an enemy's force being off the 
coast. Mr. Addmgton* wrote a few lines to beg that 
the journey might be delayed. The answer was spi- 
rited, soldierlike, and indignant. 

" Sir, — By your grounding your letter to me on 
intelligence which has just reached you, I appre- 
hend you allude to information leading you to expect 
some attempt on the part of the enemy. My wish 
to accommodate myself to any thing which you re- 
present as material to the public service, would of 
course make me desirous to comply with your re- 
quest : — 

" But if there be reason to imagine that invasion 
will take place directly, I am hound by the king's 
precise order, and by that honest zeal which is not 
allowed any Jitter sphere for its action, to hasten in- 
stantly to my regiment. If I learn that my construc- 
tion of the word intelligence is right, I shall deem it 
necessary to repair instantly to Brighton." 

In England there can be but few state secrets, and 
this correspondence soon made its way to the jour- 

* October 23. 



1803.] THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 2^1 

nals. The debate, on moving for a committee on 
the defence of the country, introduced the prince's 
name; when Tyrrwhitt, one of his household, de- 
fended him from the possible charge of reluctance, 
by stating the nature of his applications to the 
throne. The debate, though with closed doors, was 
immediately made public ; and the correspondence 
thus announced appeared in a few days. 

No sufficient light has been hitherto thrown on this 
inveterate rejection of his royal highness's services. 
The personal safety of the heir-apparent could not 
have been the object ; for, at the head of his regi- 
ment, he would probably have only taken a more 
exposed share in the struggle. Constitutional max- 
ims could scarcely have interfered ; for the prince 
neither desired to obtain an extensive command, 
nor, if he had, was the authority of the Duke of 
York to be superseded, but by the express determi- 
nation of the king. But no parliamentary torture 
could force the secret from the minister. The only 
reply which he made to Fox's angry demands, and 
to the strong expressions of curiosity on the part of 
the legislature, was the old ministerial formula of de- 
fiance : " Nothing less than the united authority of 
the house, and the direct commands of the king,' 
should compel him to say another word upon the 
subject." The true cause was probably the king's 
personal displeasure, originating in his royal high- 
ness's conduct to the princess. The unhappy con- 
nexion with Mrs. Fitzherbert had continued ; and 
was, as it had begun, a perpetual source of embar- 
rassment to the prince, of regret to the empire, and 
of offence to the king. While this contumely to 
English feeling was daily offered, there could be no 
complete reconciliation between a father who felt 
himself not more the guardian of the public rights 
than of the public morality, and a son who exhi- 
bited himself in the most conspicuous point of view 
as an offender against the great bond, of society, — 
T2 



222 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1806. 

that rite to which, above all the institutions of hu- 
man wisdom, a hallowed sanction has been given ; 
and whose disregard has been universally the fore- 
runner of national decay, as its purity and honour 
have been the unfailing pledges of national virtue, 
prosperity, and freedom. 



CHAPTER XII. 

Parliament* 



The age of parliamentary greatness was going 
down. Burke, Pitt, and Fox successively disap- 
peared; and men looked no longer to parliament 
for the old noble displays of the highest ability, ex- 
erted in the highest cause. All the forms of pane- 
gyric have been so long lavished on the memory of 
those illustrious statesmen, that praise would be now 
alike impotent and unnecessary. Their rank is fixed 
beyond change. It is the inseparable characteristic 
of the fame of those who are made for immortal re- 
membrance, that time, which decays and darkens 
ail fabricated renown, has no power over the true ; 
or rather, that it purifies and brightens the natural 
grandeur and lustre of the master mind. The tu- 
mult, the hot and misty confusion of actual life, often 
distort the great luminary ; and it is only when years 
allow us leisure to look upward, when another face 
of the world is oflfered to the heavens, and the orb 
has emerged from the vapours of our day, that we 
can see it in its glory. 

But time, like death, does even more than exalt 
and purify. By breaking the direct link between 
the man of genius and Ids country, it gives him an 
Illustrious communion with all countries. The 



1806.J FARLIAMENT. 223 

poet, the orator, and the hero are no longer the 
dwellers of a fragment of the globe ; they belong to 
the human race m all its boundaries ; the covering of 
this world's clay thrown off, their renown and their 
powers are, like their own nature, spiritualized ; they 
have passed out of, and above, the w^orld ; and from 
their immortal height they bear healing and splen- 
dour on their wings, for all lands and all generations. 

Burke died in his 68tli year,* with the calmness 
that belonged to a life in which he had never done 
intentional evil to a human being, and had done all 
the good that the finest qualities of head and heart 
could do to his country. His decline had been gra- 
dual, and he was fully aware that his hour w^as at 
hand. He had desiied a paper of Addison's to be 
read to him ; talked for some time on the perilous 
aspect of public affairs ; and then gave directions 
for his funeral. Finding himself suddenly grow 
feeble, he expressed a wish to be carried to his bed ; 
and as the attendants were conveying him to it, 
sank down in their arms, and expired without a 
groan. 

Pitt died in his 47th year,t First Lord of the Trea- 
sury, and Chancellor of the Exchequer. An illness 
which had confined him for some period, four years 
before, had left him in a state of comparative de- 
bility. The infinite labour of office, on his return to 
power, still more enfeebled a frame not naturally 
strong ; and the total overthrow of the Austrian ar- 
mies at Ulm and Austerlitz, threatening the disrup- 
tion of those alliances which it had been his pride 
to form, and on whose firmness depended the safety 
of Europe, probably increased the depression of dis- 
ease. His nervous system Avas at length so com- 
pletely deranged, that for some weeks he was unable 
to sleep. His hereditary gout returned ; and aftei 
struggling with water on the chest, he expired. By 

* my 36, 1797 t At Putney, Jan. 23, 1806. 



224 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1806. 

a vote of the house of commons, his funeral was 
at the public expense ; and a monument was erected 
to him in Westminster Abbey. 

Fox died in his 58th year.* He had reached the 
prize for which he had been labouring through life ; 
and was, at last, prime minister-! But it came only 
to escape from his hand. The fatigues of office 
were too incessapt for a frame unused to labour. 
He appears to have had some presentiment of this 
speedy termination of his existence. On hearing 
of his great rival's death ; " Pitt," said he, " has 
gone in Januaiy, perhaps I may go in June." It 
happened, by a curious coincidence, that his disorder, 
a dropsy, exhibited its first dangerous symptoms in 
June. In the middle of that month he was forced 
to discontinue his attendance in parliament. About 
the middle of the following month he became un- 
able to consult with his colleagues. And, after the 
usual efforts of the physicians to relieve him, at the 
end of August he fell into a state of languor, which 
continued until he died. 

It is remarkable, that the happiest period of Fox's 
life was that which, on ordinary principles, might be 
expected to prove the most painful — his retirement 
from the house of comm.ons. If ever man was 
born for the boldest struggles of popular life, it was 
he. For almost half a century of the most brilliant, 
yet the most difficult, time of England, he was fore- 
most in the popular gaze. His element was the 
legislature. Yet we see him quietly turn from the 
house without a remonstrance, and perhaps without 
a sigh ; begin a new career, and with books, his gar- 
den, and the occasional society of a few personal 
friends, forget ambition. This is an evidence of 
more than intellectual vigour. Of all the qualities 

. * At Chiswick, Sept. 13, 1806. 

t Lord Grenville, as First Lord of the Treasury, had the nominii 
rank ; but Fox, though only Secretary for Foreign Affairs, had the 
real one. 



1806.] PARLIAMENT. 225 

of public men, the rarest is ma^animity , The his- 
tories of fallen statesmen are generally only histo- 
ries of the miserable decrepitude of human nature, 
vanity wounded to the core, and trying to salve itself 
by mean regrets, or meaner accusations, or, meanest 
of all, by licking the dust of the trampler's feet, and 
being content to creep up into influence again — to 
reach by reptilism a reptile's power. 

On the Continent, an overthrown statesman is 
generally like an overthrown child ; he weeps, he 
tears his hair, he exclaims against every thing round 
him, he is undone ! When Neckar was dismissed 
by Louis the Sixteenth, no language could equal his 
despair. He was still tlie most popular man in 
France, and one of the most opulent. But the loss 
of his porte-feuille ; the departed vision of bowing 
clerks ; the solitude of his hotel, no longer a levee 
of the courtiers, whom he professed to despise, 
and whom no man had gone further to ruin; 
broke down the financial sovereign of France into a 
discharged menial; and his delicious villa on the 
shores of the Lake of Geneva, surrounded by every 
charm of earth and sky, a magnificence of nature" 
that seems given to inspire grandeur into the human 
mind, was a dungeon to the cashiered minister. 

Neckar's is but one instance of the thousand. 
Even among the more composed manners of English 
life, the loss of public occupation has been often 
followed by the loss of mental dignity; and its 
general result has been either a worthless lassitude, 
or an eager and dishonourable compromise of prin- 
ciple. But Fox gave up the leadership of opposition, 
a rank fully equal to the ministerial, in the popular 
estimate ; and seems to have settled down to the 
simplest occupations of a country life, and planted 
his flowers, and pruned his trees, and made his play- 
ful verses, and carried his musket as a private in the 
Chertsey volunteers, with as much composure as if 
he had never tasted the delightful draught of fame, 



226 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1806. 

nor soared among the fiery temptations of popular 
supremacy. 

On the failure of Lord Grey's hopeless motion for 
reform, in 1797, Fox expressed his determination of 
withdrawing from parliament. This measure may 
have been in some degree a dereliction of public 
duty; but it was probably adopted with the idea of 
forcing the nation to take some decided step against 
the ministry. It failed ; for he had miscalculated 
the public attachment to Pitt ; and he thenceforth re- 
mained tranquilly in his solitude; realizing at St. 
Ann's Hill, a small demesne near London, the life 
which Horace has so felicitously sketched for him- 
self, and which, since his day, has been the dream of 
so many accomplished and weary minds ; the leisure, 
the choice literature, and the " pleasing oblivion" of 
the cares of life. Here he renewed his knowledge 
of the classics, conquered Italian, and began Spanish. 
But the peace of Ami=ens opened France once more ; 
and Fox, making a pretext to himself of collecting 
authorities on the History of the Stuarts, but, more 
probably, with the common desire to see the changes 
wrought by the revolution, went to Paris. 

He was received with extraordinary civilities by 
all ranks ; but the chief feature of his visit, and the 
only one that can interest us now, was his intercourse 
with the "First Consul." It is difficult to know 
whether Napoleon formed a just conception of Fox ; 
but it is evident that Fox formed, at least in the be- 
ginning, a curiously untrue one of Napoleon. Imme- 
diately on his appearance in the crowd at the Tuile- 
ries, the first consul singled him out, and held a 
marked conversation with him. " There are in the 
world," said this disposer of the fates of empires, 
" but two nations, the one inhabiting the east, and 
the other the west. The English, French, Germans, 
Italians, &c. &c., under the same civil code, having 
the same manners, the same habits, and almost the 
same religion, are all members of the same family. 



1806.] PARLIAMENT. 227 

The men who would wish to light up again the flame 
of war among them wish for civil war." He con- 
cluded by a compliment to him, as the distinguished 
friend of peace. 

Fox dined with him on the same day ; and the 
conversation turned on the trial by jury, of which 
Napoleon could not bring himself to approve, — " it 
was so Gothic, cumbrous, and might be so inconvenient 
to a government." Fox, with honest John Bullism, 
told him, that " the inconvenience was the very thing 
for which he liked it." 

But, startling as those military opinions of justice 
between man and man might be, Napoleon succeeded 
in impressing a very high idea even of his heart ; and 
if we are to rely upon reported conversations at the 
time. Fox declared that — " the first consul of France 
was as magnificent in his means as in his ends ; that 
he possessed a most decided character, and that his 
views were not directed against Great Britain, but 
against the Continent ; that his commercial enmity 
was but a temporary measure, and was never in- 
tended to be acted upon as a permanent policy ; and 
that he had a proud candour ! which, in the confi- 
dence of success in whatever he resolved, scorned to 
conceal its intentions.'''' " I never saw," said he, " so 
little indirectness in any statesman as in the first con- 
sul. He. makes no secret of his designs." 

The sparkling sentences and oracular maxims of 
Napoleon, the novelty of the bulletin-style, had evi- 
dently imposed on his good-natured guest ; and such, 
by universal acknowledgment, was his brilliancy and 
force in conversation, that the only hope of detecting 
the arlifice was in removing to a distance from the 
deceiver. But Fox enjoyed an early and a com- 
plete opportunity of rectifying his opinions on this 
most subtle of men. He had scarcely entered the 
whig cabinet, when he found himself entangled in a 
mock negotiation ; saw the negotiation dexterously 
protracted until all things were ripe for the ruin of 



228 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1806 

Prussia ; and then saw Napoleon and Talleyrand fly 
together from Paris to the ruin, leaving his bewildered 
ambassador to be laughed at by Europe.* 

Fox's death closed the era of parliamentary elo- 
quence. There have been able and animated speakers 
since ; but there are few examples of that lofty and 
original mastery of the understanding and the pas- 
sions, which characterized the public speaking of that 
distinguished time : while to the speeches of Fox, 
Pitt, Burke, and Sheridan, we still go for the study 
of the art, for the highest principles of eloquence 
illustrated by the highest examples. Of the compa- 
rative powers of those remarkable men, the general 
impression among their contemporaries was, — that 
Fox stood in the foremost rank, as a debater. His 
capacity, his manner, and his language were parlia- 
mentary, in an exclusive and unequalled degree. 
Pitt and Burke must have been eminent in any as- 
sembly of any age or nation, where the human intel- 
lect was to be kindled and charmed by power of 
thought and language. A Greek or a Roman audi- 
ence would have listened to either with admiration, 
and owned the influence of their flow and grandeur ; 
but Fox was made for England, and peculiarly for the 
parliament of England. 

Innumerable panegyrics on his public abilities ap- 
peared immediately after his death. But by far the 
closest and most critical was given by Lord Erskine, 
at a distance of time which precluded the immediate 
influence of partiality, and which allowed fuU leisure 
to compare the illustrious dead with all of surviving 
excellence. The whole passage itself deserves to 



* One of the plajnies of popularity was felt by Fox in the applications 
of the French artists to take his likeness. Medalists, sculptors, and 
painters haunted him perpetually, with all the odd vehemence of the 
national character. One sculptor had persecuted him to sit for a statue. 
Fox at last inquired whether the sitting would put him to any inconve- 
nience. " None whatever," said the Frenchman ; " you must only taks 
off your shirt and sit naked, till you are modelled 1" 



1806.] PARLIAMENT. 229 

be treasured, as an honour equally to Fox and 
Erskine. 

" This extraordinary person, generally, in rising to 
speak, had evidently no more premeditated the par- 
ticular language he should employ, nor, frequently, 
the illustrations and images by which he should dis- 
cuss and enforce his subject, than he had contem- 
plated the hour he was to die. And his exalted merit 
as a debater in parliament did not, therefore, consist 
in the length, variety, or roundness of his periods, 
but in the truth and vigour of his conceptions ; in the 
depth and extent of his information ; in the retentive 
powers of his memory, which enabled him to keep 
in constant view, not only all that he had formerly 
read and reflected on, but every thing said at the 
moment, and even at other times, by the various per- 
sons whose arguments he was to answer; in the 
faculty of spreading out his matter so clearly to the 
grasp of his own mind, as to render it impossible he 
should ever fail in the utmost clearness and distinct- 
ness to others ; in the exuberant fertility of his ima- 
gination, which spontaneously brought forth his 
ideas at the moment, in every possible shape in 
which the understanding might sit in judgment on 
them ; while, instead of seeking afterward to enforce 
them by cold premeditated illustrations or by epi- 
sodes, which, however beautiful, only distract atten- 
tion, he was accustomed to repass his subject, not 
methodically, but in the most unforeseen and fasci- 
nating review, enlightening every part of it; and 
binding even his adversaries in a kind of spell of 
involuntary assent for the time. 

# ^ ^ ^ ^ 

" This will be found more particularly to apply to 
his speeches upon sudden and unforeseen occasions, 
when certainly nothing could be more interesting 
and extraordinary than to witness, as I have often 
done, the mighty and unprepared efforts of his mind, 
when he had to encounter the arguments of some 

U 



230 UEORGE THE FOURTH. [1806. 

profound reasoner, who had deeply considered his 
subject, and arranged it with all possible art, to pre- 
serve its parts unbroken. To hear him begin on 
such occasions, without method, without any kind 
of exertion, without the smallest impulse from the 
desire of distinction or triumph, and animated only 
by the honest sense of duty ; an audience who knew 
him not, would have expected little success from the 
conflict; as little as a traveller in the East, while 
trembling- at a buffalo in the wild vigour of its well- 
protected strength, would have looked to its imme- 
diate destruction, when he saw the boa moving 
slowly and inertly towards him on the grass. But 
Fox, unlike the serpent in every thing but his 
strength, always taking his station in some fixed, 
invulnerable principles, soon surrounded and entan- 
gled his adversary, disjointing every member of his 
discourse, and strangling him in the irresistible folds 
of truth. 

" This intellectual superiority, by which my illus- 
trious friend was so eminently distinguished, might 
nevertheless have existed in all its strength, without 
raising him to the exalted station he held as a public 
speaker. The powers of the understanding are not 
of themselves sufficient for this high purpose. In- 
tellect alone, however exalted, without strong feeU 
^«^s, without even irritable sensibility, would be only 
like an immense magazine of gunpowder, if there 
were no such element as fire in the natural world. 
It is the heart which is the spring and fountain of elo- 
quence. A cold-blooded learned man might, for 
any thing I know, compose in his closet an eloquent 
book ; but in public discourse, arising out of sudden 
occasions, he could, by no possibility, be eloquent. 

tP "JP * W W 

" It has been said, that he was frequently careless 
of the language in which he expressed himself; but 
I can neither agree to the justice, nor even compre- 
hend the meaning of that criticism. He coiUd not be 



1806.] PARLIAMENT. ^ 231 

tncorred from carelessness; because, having lived 
from his youth in the great v^orld, and having been 
familiarly conversant with the classics of all nations, 
his most unprepared speaking (or, if critics will have 
it so, his most negligent) must have been at least 
grammatical f which it not only uniformly was, but 
distinguished by its taste ; more than that could not 
have belonged to it, without the very care which his 
habits and his talents equally rejected. 

" He midoubtedly attached as little to the musical 
intonation of his speeches as to the language in 
which they were expressed. His emphases were the 
unstudied eflfusions of nature; the. vents of a mind 
burning intensely with the generous flame of public 
spirit and benevolence, beyond all control or manage- 
ment when impassioned, and above the rules to which 
inferior things are properly subjected: his sentences 
often rapidly succeeded^ and almost mixed them- 
selves with one another ; as the lava rises in bursts 
from the mouth of a volcano, when the resistless 
energies of the subterranean world are at their 
height." 

Fox's politics may now be obsolete ; his parlia- 
mentary triumphs may be air ; his eloquence may be 
rivalled, or shorn of its beams by time; but one 
source of glory cannot be extinguished, — the aboli- 
tion of the slave-trade ! This victory no man can 
take from him. Whatever variety of opinion may 
be formed on his public principles, whatever con- 
demnation may be found for his personal career, 
whatever doubts of his great faculties ; — on this one 
subject all voices will be raised in his honour ; and 
the hand of every man of English feelmg will add a 
stone to the monument that perpetuates his name. 
On the 10th of June, 1806, Fox brought forward his 
motion, in a speech brief but decided. " So fully," 
said he, " am I impressed with the vast importance 
and necessity of attaining what will be the object 



232 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1806. 

of my motion to-nig-ht, that if, during- the forty 
years that I have had the honour of a seat in parlia- 
ment, I should have been so fortunate as to accom- 
plish that, and that only, I should think I had done 
enough, and should retire from public life with com- 
fort, and the conscious satisfaction that I had done 
my duty." 

His speech concluded with the immortal resolu- 
tion. That this House, conceiving the African Slave- 
trade TO BE CONTRARY TO THE PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE, 
HUMANITY, AND SOUND POLICY, WILL, WITH ALL PRACTICA- 
BLE EXPEDITION, PROCEED TO TAKE EFFECTUAL MEASURES 
FOR ABOLISHING THE SlAVE-TRADE, IN SUCH MANNER AND 
AT SUCH PERIOD AS MAY BE DEEMED ADVISABLE." 

On the division one hundred and fourteen voted 
for the measure, against it only fifteen! This was 
the last effort made by Fox. In a few days after, 
he was taken ill of his mortal disease. No orator, 
no philosopher, no patriot could have wished for a 
nobler close to his labours. 

It must seem extraordinary that Pitt should have 
left this great duty to be done by another. Some of 
his ablest speeches had been in condemnation of the 
slave-trade. He had pronounced it a national dis- 
grace and calamity. And what man, not turned into 
a wild beast by avarice, — that passion alternately the 
meanest and the most darings* ^he basest and the 
bloodiest, — that passion which, of all, assimilates 
and combines the most thoroughly with the evil of 
perverted human nature, — but must have looked 
upon that trade with horror? "This," exclaimed 
Burke, " is not a traffic in the labour of man, but in 
the man himself." It was ascertained that from 
seventy to eighty thousand slaves had been carried 
from Africa to the West Indies in a single year ; and 
with what misery beyond all calculation!- What 
agonies of heart, at the utter and eternal parting 
from friends, kindred, and home ! What indescriba- 
ble torture in the slave-ships, where they burned 



18 06. J PARLIAMENT. 233 

under the tropical day packed in dens, without room 
to move, to stand, or even to lie down, — chained, 
scourged, famished, withering- with fever and. thirst : 
human layers festering on each other ; the dead, the 
dying, the frantic, and the tortured compressed to- 
gethef like bales of merchandise ; hundreds seizing 
the first moment of seeing the light and aii, to fling 
themselves overboard ; hundreds dying of grie^ 
thousands dying of pestilence ; and the rest, even 
more wretched, surviving only for a hopeless capti- 
vity in a strange land, to labour for life under the 
whips of overseers, savages immeasurably more 
brutal and debased than their unfortunate victims ! 

With what eyes must Providence have looked 
down upon this tremendous accumulation of guilt, 
this hideous abuse of the power of European know- 
ledge and wealth over the miserable African; and 
with what solemn justice may it not have answered 
the cry of the blood out of the ground! The ven- 
geance of Heaven on individuals is wisely, in most 
instances, put beyond human discovery. But for 
nations there is no judgment to come, no great after- 
reckoning to make all straight, and vindicate the 
ways of God to man. They must be punished here ; 
and it might be neither difficult nor unproductive of 
the best knowledge, — the Christian's faith in the ever- 
waking and resistless control of Providence, — to 
trace the punfehment of this enormous crime in Eu- 
rope. The slave-trade perhaps lost America to Eng- 
land, and the crime was thus punished at its height, 
and within view of the spot where it was committed. 
But our crime was done in ignorance; the people 
of this kingdom had known little of its nature ; and 
they required only to know it, to wash their hands 
of the stain. It may have been for this reason, that, 
of all unsuccessful wars, the American was the least 
marked with national loss; and that, of all ab- 
scissions of empire, the independence of the United 
States was the most rapidly converted into national 
U2 



234 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1806. 

advantage. But it is upon the kingdoms which, in 
the face of perfect knowledge, in scorn of remon- 
strances that might wake the stones to feel, in 
treacherous evasion of treaties, in defiance of even 
the base bargains in which they exacted the money 
of this country to buy off the blood of the African, 
have still carried on the trade, that undisguised and 
unmitigated vengeance may have fallen, and be still 
falling. 

The three great slave-traders whom it has been 
found impossible to persuade or to restrain are, 
France, Spain, and Portugal. And in what circum- 
stances are the colonies for whose peculiar support 
this dreadful traffic was carried on 1 France has to- 
tally lost St. Domingo, the finest colony in the world, 
and her colonial trade is now a cipher. Spain has 
lost all; Portugal has lost all. Mexico, South 
America, and the Brazils are severed from their old 
masters for ever. And what have been the especial 
calamities of the sovereigns of those countries? 
They have been, all three, expatriated, and the only 
three. Other sovereigns have suffered temporary 
evil under the chances of war ; but France, Spain, 
and Portugal have exhibited the peculiar shame of 
three dynasties at once in exile : — the Portuguese 
flying across the sea, to escape from an enemy in its 
capital, and hide its head in a barbarian land;— the 
Spanish dethroned, and sent to display its spectacle 
of mendicant and decrepit royalty through Europe; 
— and the French doubly undone ! 

The first effort of Louis XVIII. on his restoration, 
was to re-establish the slave-trade. Before twelve 
months were past, he was flying for his life to the 
protection of strangers ! On the second restoration 
the trade was again revived. All representations of . 
its horrors, aggravated as they are now by the law- 
less rapacity of the foreign traders, were received 
with mock acquiescence, and real scorn. And 
where are the Bourbons now ? 



1806.] PARLIAMENT. 235 

And what is the peace, or the prosperity, of the 
countries that have thus dipped their guilty gains in 
human miseries? They are three vast centres of 
feud and revolutionary terror; — Portugal, with an 
unowned monarch, reigning by the bayonet and 
the scaffold, with half her leading men in dungeons, 
with her territory itself a dungeon ; and fierce reta- 
liation and phrensied enthusiasm hovering on her fron- 
tiers, and ready to plunge into the bosom of the land. 
— Spain, torn by faction, and at this hour v/atching 
every band that gathers on her hills, as the signs of 
a tempest that may sweep the land from the Pyre- 
nees to the ocean. — And France, in the first heavings 
of a mighty change, that man can no more define 
than he can set limits to the heaving of an earth- 
quake, or the swell and fury of a deluge. Other 
great objects and causes may have their share in 
those things. But the facts are before mankind. 

The probable ground of Pitt's reluctance to crush 
the slave-trade at the instant, was his fear of dis- 
turbing the financial system, in the midst of a period 
which made all minds tremble at the name of experi- 
ment. While the whole fabric of empire was tot- 
tering, there might be rashness even in the attempt 
to repair the building ; and it required higher feel- 
ings than are to be learned in the subterranean of 
^politics, — the magnanimity of religious faith, — to do 
good without fear, and leave the rest to the great 
Disposer. The war had been altogether a war of 
finance. Pitt was, pre-eminently, a financier ; and, 
like all men with one object perpetually before them, 
he involuntarily suffered the consideration of rents 
and revenues to distend on his sight, until it shut out 
every other. The abolition was a novelty ; and he 
had seen a more auspicious novelty, a free consti- 
tution, overthrow the whole establishment of the 
most powerful kingdom of Europe. England was at 
that hour covered with the wreck of France ; prince, 
priest, and noble flying from the brilliant evil. 



236 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1806. 

The nature of its advocates, too, justified some 
jealousy ; for among the virtuous and patriotic, there 
were to be found individuals scarcely less than 
avowed rebels to the constitution. None are more 
tolerant than they who scoff at all creeds alike ; none 
more humane than they who have nothing to give; none 
more rigorous in demanding public sacrifices, than 
they who feel themselves exempt from all sacrifice. 
In 1792, the commencement of Mr. Wilberforce's 
efforts against the slave-trade, England was overrun 
with those cheap sages and heroes. The whole land 
was thick with a crop of spurious tolerance, genero- 
sity, and virtue. The slave-trade came forth a new 
topic, started in the fortunate hour, to cheer the sink- 
ing energies of popular outcry. It was the live coal 
on the lips of the seer, already weary of denounc- 
ing unperformed wrath against the throne. It sup- 
plied the whole bustling tribe of the Platos and Pho- 
cions of the streets with illustration, and it supplied 
them with it safe. The horrors of the trade threw 
an allegorical veil over the picture, while the artist 
was insolently limning the guilt and punishment of 
supposed royal and aristocratic offences at home ; the 
King of Dahomy prefigured a monarch, whom it was 
yet hazardous to denounce by name ; the smiting of 
West Indian planters by the popular hand led the 
mind's eye to loftier execution on more hated pos- 
sessors of wealth and power ; and the havoc of ne- 
gro insurrection lent its deepest colourings to that 
promised tornado of vengeance, which, " in an hour 
that we knew not of," was to sweep from the earth, 
the nobility, church, and crown of the British em- 
pire. 

Yet, it is to be lamented that, for the completion 
of a fame almost at the full, Pitt did not give more 
than his voice against the slave-trade ; that he had 
not nobly dared ; that by this solitary instance of he- 
sitation in a cause worthy of himself, the illustrious 
act which shed glory on the close even of Fox's 



'1807.] THE WHIG CABINET. 237 

strug-gling career was not permitted to scatter the 
darkness and sorrow which hung round his honoured 
death-bed, and finish in kindred splendour the long 
triumphs of the first statesman of the world. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

The Whig Cabinet. 



The whig administration of 1807 totally failed, 
and deserved to fail. Its first announcement had 
struck the nation with surprise and scorn. Lord 
Grenville in alliance with Fox ! was a coalition which 
none could comprehend, but on the principle of that 
all-swallowing- avidity for place which degrades 
alike the personal and public character of the states- 
man. Lord Grenville, the direct agent of Pitt for so 
many years, the official opponent of democracy in all 
its shapes, the professional speaker against reform, 
the secretary who had dismissed M. Chauvelin and 
his republican peace with justified contempt, and who, 
with equal contempt, had denied the competence and 
will of the successive tyrants of France to make 
peace ; was it possible that this man should now ex- 
hibit himself in close connexion with the antagonist 
of Pitt on every point of government, with the 
avowed reformer, the perpetual assertor of the sin- 
cerity of France, Fox, the orator of the populace, the 
champion of Jacobin peace, and the public admirer 
and panegyrist of Napoleon ! The very name of a 
coaliton jarred on the public ear. It was the open- 
ing of a sluice that let out a whole torrent of scorn. 

The national mind of England has never yet made 
a wrong judgment. A whole people, furnished as 
England is with the means of knowledge, and the 



238 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1807. 

invaluable freedom of expressing- its thoughts, that 
true salt of the constitution, cannot en\ It is pre- 
served from error by something like those great con- 
trivances of Nature which make the salubrity of the 
ocean and the atmosphere ; the innumerable currents 
and diversities of public opinion, but preserve its ac- 
tivity, while they impel and guide each other into the 
general course of national safety and wisdom. 

Fox's coalition with North was the original sin of 
his life. He never recovered from that first and fatal 
impression. Yet, there, little was to be compromised 
but the personal hostility. Here the hostility was 
upon all the principles of state ; and no ingenuity of 
gloss, no declared perseverance in principle, and no 
ostentatious zeal for the good of the country could 
prevent the nation from looking on Lord Grenville 
as a fallen man ; feebly attempting to cover with the 
remnant of his reputation the nakedness of whig- 
gism ; bowing down at the footstool of office a head 
to which old experience ought to have taught wis- 
dom, if it could not teach dignity ; and thenceforth 
worthless for all purposes, but the humiliating and 
melancholy one, of a warning to all who should in 
future be tempted by a pitiable appetite for power. 

The acts of the new coalition were inevitably 
marked with the disgraces and tergiversations of its 
parentage. Lord Grenville was appointed first lord 
of the Treasury. But he had already secured the 
auditorship of the Exchequer, a place of four thou- 
sand a-year for life, and this he was determined not 
to give, up, obnoxious as it must be to the most con- 
temptuous reflections. The national voice de- 
manded, — under what pretence Lord Grenville could 
retain two offices totally incompatible with each 
other? Why, in this instance alone, the disburse- 
ment of the public money, and the check on that dis- 
bursement, should be in the same officer? Why, 
with one hand in the public purse, he should pass his 
accounts with the other; be the supervisor over his 



1807.] THE WHIG CABINET. 2^9 

own conduct, and give himself a receipt in full for 
nis own integrity 1 

His lordship bore the storm with official philoso- 
phy—listened, and kept his four thousand pounds 
a-year. A poor attempt at evading- public scandal was 
made, by appointing a trustee for the auditorship, 
whom his lordship was to pay ; a rigid inspector, of 
course, of the possible irregularities of the man on 
whose money he was to live ! 

Another compromise followed, of a still more ha- 
zardous nature. To strengthen the administration, 
it had been deemed necessary to summon the aid of 
Lord Sidmouth's friends; and his lordship's terms 
were, two seats in the cabinet, one for himself and 
one for Lord Ellenborough, the Chief Justice of the 
King's Bench. This direct attempt to connect the 
ministry with the courts of law, awoke alann through- 
out the empire. The practical value of the free con- 
stitution of England exists in the courts of law. If 
the legislature is the bulwark of English liberty ; the 
purity and complete independence, pecuniary and po- 
litical, of the bench of judges is liberty itself. For, 
as no constitution can be worth the paper that it is 
written upon while the subject fears for his person 
or his property, the first ground and security of na- 
tional freedom must be in that majesty of law which 
protects him in doing all things that are manly, ho- 
nest, and lawful. And it is thus that, while legisla- 
tures may have been weak, and ministers rash or ar- 
bitrary, the practical freedom of this first and most 
fortunate of countries has suffered no disturbance 
for a hundred years ; has continually become more 
precious to its people ; and has secured, and will se- 
cure, England from the desperate convulsions which 
the very impulse of nature forces on foreign lands, 
to give even a partial restoration to the powers of _ 
man. 

A motion on this most repulsive appointment was 
brought forward by Lord Bristol in the lords, and by 



240 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1807. 

Mr. Spejicer Stanhope in the commons, — " That it was 
highly inexpedient, and tended to weaken the admimS' 
tration of justice, to summon to any committee or as- 
sembly of the privy council any of the judges of his 
majesty's courts of common law." The motion was 
supported in the lords by Lord Eldon, where it was 
negatived without a division ! — and in the commons 
by Canning, Wilberforce, Lord Castlereagh, and Mr. 
Perceval; where, too, it was negatived, and almost 
with similar contumely, — by 222 to 64 ! 

Nothing could be more palpable than the evil of 
breaking down the barriers which shut out the influ- 
ence of ministers from Westminster Hall. By turn- 
ing the judge into the politician, he might be alto- 
gether perverted into a place-hunter ; and his inte- 
grity must be in a continual state of temptation, from 
the patronage of office. By making him a cabinet 
minister, he might be called on to enact measures of 
severity against the individual whom he might be 
also called on to try for life or death within the week. 
How was he to bring an unprejudiced mind into the 
courts, when he had already made up his determi- 
nation in the cabinet 1 or to decide before God and 
the country on the case of the man whom he had 
but a few hours past condemned as a libeller or a 
traitor before the minister and his colleagues ? — 
What was to prevent the persecutor in the cabinet 
from being the homicide on the bench ] 

Yet this appointment, which, in the public mind, 
amounted to the most violent departure from Eng- 
lish principle ; which might have rapidly involved a 
total perversion of the law ; and which must have 
instantly shaken the national confidence in the 
administration of justice, was carried with a high 
hand by the old clamourers for universal liberty ; 
the champions who, for two-and-twenty years, had 
made parliament, the hustings, and the tavern alike 
ring with their more than patriotism ; the haughty 
challengers of the whole power of the state to lay a 
finger on the ark of the constitution ! 



1807.] THE WHIG CABINET. 241 

The maxims which the coalition thus laboured are 
worthy of being- chronicled : — " The cabinet, as such, 
is not responsible for the measures of government ! — 
No individual minister is responsible for raore than 
his own acts, and such advice as he can be proved to 
have actually given ! — A cabinet counsellor per- 
iOrms no duties, and incurs no responsibility, to which 
as a privy-counsellor he is not liable ! — And the 
judges of England are not intended by the constitu- 
tion of the country to be such insulated beings as 
speculative writers represent them !" 

And those enormous absurdities were advanced 
and fiercely defended by the whole body of the 
whigs ! Well might the nation burst into an outcry 
of wonder and aversion. And well may men, yet 
untainted by politics, lift up their hands aiid thank 
their God for the humble station which has pre- 
served them from being tempted to such betrayals of 
the headlong folly and short-sighted, sordid covet- 
ousness of human nature ! 

Compromise was the only principle which the 
new coalition seemed to acknowledge. The Ca- 
tholic question was Fox's first bond, and to this he 
was pledged by the declarations of a life. But Lord 
Sidmouth was disinclined to it ; and the king was 
resolved against it. That honest king had taken no 
degree in the new school of compromise ; he left its 
hoods and gowns to cover the awkward procession 
of those " budge doctors of the stoic fur," the pro- 
fessors of expediency. He had instantly refused to 
concede. There was, then, no alternative but to 
resign, or to adjourn the question ; and it was ad- 
journed. 

Ministers next required that the control of the 
army should be put into their hands ; in other words, 
that the Duke of York should be removed. This the 
king refused, on the obvious ground, that the army 
had been kept separate from the other branches of 
the administration since the time of the Duke of 

X 



242 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1807 

Cumberland ; and finally declared that he would not 
remove the Duke of York. The transaction closed, 
of course, in compromise ; the ministers agreed that 
no chang-e in the command should take place with' 
out the royal approbation. 

All was failure. Their financial discoveries, 
which had been heralded for years with all the pomp 
and all the mystery of the new " Illumines"' of Poli- 
tical Economy, — a science which has succeeded to 
the honours and the merits of astrology, — were found 
fit only to glitter in the pages of a review, and eva- 
porated, upon trial, into two abortive taxes. But if 
the relief was visionary, not so was the burden. 
Whig finance left its mark in two tremendous impo- 
sitions. The hated property-tax was raised from 
six and a half to ten per cent. ! and ten per cent, was 
added to the assessed taxes! 

Their exploits as warriors were calculated to give 
them as high a niche in history as their financial 
achievements. They sent out four expeditions. 
The whole four failed ; some with heavy loss, some 
with ignominy, and all with ridicule ! — Moore was 
compelled to fly from the mad king of Sweden 
in a cart, and to ship off his army at a moment's no- 
tice. — The expedition to Egypt was beaten on the 
old scene of British victory, was forced to lay down 
Its arms to a rabble of Turks, and succeeded in 
nothing but in alienating the population. The ex- 
pedition under Whitelock, to Buenos Ayres, is syno- 
nymous with national shame : it insulted us with 
the scandalous spectacle of a British army beaten out 
of the country by a banditti. The expedition to the 
Dardanelles exhibited the combined disgrace of our 
arms and our diplomacy ; the British ambassador 
baffied by the French, and even by the brute policy 
of the Turkish agent; and the British fleet flying full 
sail down the Dardanelles, helplessly battered by 
the Turkish cannon-balls. The_four quarters of the 



1807.] THE WHIG CABINET. 243 

globe were furnished with the trophies of a coali- 
tion ministry ! 

There was one way more in which a cabinet 
could go wrong- ; and of that way they availed them- 
selves with characteristic adroitness. 

Fox had scarcely entered upon office, when he was 
enticed into a negotiation by the French govern- 
ment ; and the finesse of the contrivcince was wor- 
thy of Talleyrand. A stranger presented himself to 
the foreign secretary, with the proposal of assassinat- 
ing the first consul. Fox, with the feelings of an Eng- 
lish gentleman, was shocked at an idea so abomina- 
ble ; and ordering the proposer into custody, wrote a 
brief letter to the French court to mention the cir- 
cumstance, and put Napoleon on his guard agains* 
this illegitimate mode of terminating hostilities. 
Talleyrand's answer was equally brief, but contained 
a dexterous compliment from Napoleon on his cor- 
respondent's " honour and virtue." Another letter, 
of equal civility, dated on the same day, conveyed 
an appropriate extract from Napoleon's speech on 
thie opening of the legislature. The Freiich minis- 
ter's note is an exquisite specimen of the diplomatic 
art of " feeling the way." 

Note 2. " Sir, — It may be agreeable to you to 
receive news from this country. 

" I send you the emperor's speech to the legisla- 
tive body. You will therein see that our wishes are 
still for peace. / do not ask what is the prevailing 
inclination with you ; but if the advantages of peace 
are duly appreciated, you know on what basis it may 
be discussed." 

Note 3. — Extract from the speech. "I desire 
peace with England. On my part I shall never de- 
lay it a moment. I shall always be ready to con- 
clude it, taking for its basis the stipulations of the 
treaty of A miens." 



244 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1807. 

The snare was completely laid ; and the whig ca- 
binet was caught at the moment. Within a week 
from the receipt of those billets, a formal cabinet let- 
ter was despatched to the Tuileries, plunging head- 
long into the question, with all its bases, alliances, 
and compensations. What a sardonic smile must 
have sat on the lips of the two matchless confederates, 
as they looked over this letter together ! with what 
infinite burlesque must they have laughed at the wis- 
dom of the wise ! W^e may almost forgive them their 
triumph, for the sake of its dexterity. Napoleon's 
sworn purpose, from the day of Austerlitz, had been 
the fall of Prussia. He had felt his dignity mo- 
lested by her threat of assisting Austria in the war ; 
and he was determined that, whatever capital of Eu- 
rope he might seize in future, he would not have 
a Prussian anny of a hundred and fifty thousand men 
on his flank, to frown at the operation ; Prussia was 
to be smitten ! But by what artifice was England to 
be blindfolded, while the last military kingdom of 
the continent was turned into a kingdom of hew- 
ers of wood and drawers of water ? To sow jea- 
lousy between them, he gave Hanover to Prussia : 
the boon was grasped at with guilty eagerness ; and 
his object was effected at once. England was in- 
dignant at the treacherous acceptance. Still, the 
approach of direct hostilities might rouse England, 
and even Russia, to her aid. It was essential to dis- 
tract the attention of both, while France was collect- 
ing that storm of havoc which was to sweep the 
monarchy of Frederic from the list of nations. A 
negotiation with England would at once paralyze 
the warlike preparations of the country, make Rus- 
sia distrustful of our alliance, and cut off Prussia 
from all hope. 

Napoleon knew that Fox's ambition was, to be the 
peace-maker of Europe ; and he well remembered, 
too, those conversations at the Tuileries, in which 
his guest had almost infringed on court etiquette in 



1807.] THE WHIG CABINET. 245 

vindicating Pitt and Windham, with the loudest 
scorn and disdain, from all share in the conspiracy 
of " the infernal machine." It was at this sensitive 
point of his character that the artifice was levelled. 
The eloquent abhorrer of assassination was suddenly 
presented in his clos«t with an avowed assassin. 
Of all the stimulants that art could devise, there was 
none more certain of kindling him. The calculation 
was incomparably true ; Fox, full of generous wrath, 
instantly wrote to apprize the first consul of his ha- 
zard. The letter was answered by bland homage, 
in which the " first consul recognised the honour and 
virtue" of his feelings ; followed by a still blander 
promise of peace, from a speech made almost at the 
moment when the pretended assassin was sent from 
Paris, and the train of artifice was begun, which left 
Prussia at the mercy of the destroyer. 

But all the details of this ludicrous negotiation 
were equally ludicrous. Talleyrand had completely 
involved the cabinet ; he had, with the ease of con- 
summate skill, played on their peace-making vanity, 
and entrapped them even into the very folly which 
they had determined not to commit ; that of making 
the first overtures. He had now a second pitfall for 
them. To make " assurance double sure," and pre- 
vent the possibility of their opening their eyes, he 
actually contrived to make them commission the 
first ambassador ! 

He sent for Lord Yarmouth (since Marquis of 
Hertford), one of the detenus at Yerdun, a nobleman 
of enormous fortune, but whose diplomatic faculties 
were yet in the bud. Lord Yarmouth obeyed the 
summons, commenced an intercourse with Talley- 
rand in Paris, and was instantly meshed in the diplo- 
matic web, and puzzled in the uti possidetis to such 
a profound degree, that ministers were compelled to 
send a superior to extract his lordship from his per- 
plexities ; or, in the confused phrase of office, " The 
necessity arose of some other negotiator, fully in- 
X2 



246 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1807. 

structed in the sentiments of his majestj'^'s govern- 
ment on all the various points of discussion that 
might arise," &c. &c. 

But the whole mystification is incomparable. Tal- 
leyrand had not chosen his diplomatist in vain ; and 
the familiar dexterity with which he drove his lord- 
ship into the toils, is one of the most amusing epi- 
sodes in the history of negotiation. The wily 
Frenchman's purpose was to make the British cabi- 
net answerable for every lapse of their unfledged 
agent ; but this could not be done without the pro- 
duction of his powers to treat. He summoned him 
to a conference, and told him that the fates of Eu- 
rope depended upon his instant display of those 
weighty documents. "There was Germany," said 
the Frenchman, " a week ago you might have saved 
it, if you were empowered to negotiate : but the em- 
peror could wait no longer, the fate of Germany 
was sealed : et nous n'en reviendrons jamais.^ — Rus- 
sia is new in the scale. Will you save Russia? 
Produce your full powers, or her fate will be sealed 
in two days ! — Switzerland comes next : it is on the 
eve of undergoing a great change. Will you save 
it ? Nothing can do this but a peace with England : 
produce your full powers ! — We are on the point of 
invading Portugal. Nothing 'on earth but a peace 
with England can prevent our seizing it : our army 
is already gathering at Bayonne. All depends on 
England. Produce your full powers!" — But the 
keenest shaft was in reserve. " Prussia," said Tal- 
leyrand, " insists on our confirming her possession 
of Hanover ; and we cannot consent wantonly to lose 
the only ally France has had since the Revolution. 
Will you save Hanover, and thus permit us to prefer 
England to Prussia 1 produce your full powers !" 

The appeal was irresistible. His lordship was re- 
morselessly mystified. The visions of kingdoms fall- 

* We shall never recede from our decision 



1807.] THE WHIG CABINET. 247 

ing and fallen round him were not to be withstood, 
while he had the cheap restorative in his pocket : and. 
to save Europe, to arrest the progress of Napoleon at 
the head of five hundred thousand men, and clip the 
wings of an ambition that was longing to oversha- 
dow the world. Lord Yarmouth produced his full 
powers : and began his career as a plenipotentiary ! 

How any man living could conceive, after ten 
years' display of Napoleon's character, that he was 
to be stopped by the trite fooleries of billets des- 
patched every half-hour from one hotel to another ; 
— how any person, walking the streets of Paris, 
could have escaped the knowledge that all France 
was ringing with preparation for a Prussian cam- 
paign, and that the most revengeful feelings against 
Prussia were exhibited on all occasions ; — ^how any 
man of common understanding could have doubted, 
that the kingdom in the jaws of destruction, the ally 
which England should instantly seek and support, 
the last hope of the continent, was Prussia; are 
questions which we must leave to the elucidation of 
noble plenipotentiaries alone. 

England was utterly astonished at this transac- 
tion. Even the cabinet were forced to awake. A 
new diplomatist was forthwith transmitted, and a 
despatch written, to stop his lordship in this precipi- 
tate salvation of Europe. " I need hardly observe 
to your lordship," are Mr. Secretary Fox's emphatic 
words, " that it is of the utmost importance, that in 
the interim (till the arrival of the new ambassador) 
your lordship should avoid taking any step, or even 
holding any language, which may tend in the smallest 
degree to commit the opinion of his majesty's govern- 
ment on any part of tiie matters now depending." 

But the diplomatic depths of this unfortunate ca- 
binet were not yet sounded. The Fabius substituted 
for their rapid plenipotentiary was Lord Lauderdale, 
an old adlierent of FoXj and a pamphleteer on politi- 
cal economy ; and content to rest on those titles to 



248 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1807 

fame. Yet this nobleman was not to go alone ; he 
was to be supported by the political experience of 
Dugald Stewart! a lecturer of much reputation in 
the North, and probably a personage of formidable 
wisdom to an Edinburgh student of metaphysics. 
And those two were to combat tlie two ablest men 
in Europe ! Two dreamers of the schools, to come 
into conflict with two men of the first rank of poli- 
tical genius, invigorated by perpetual experience in 
the highest concerns : Lord Lauderdale and Dugald 
Stewart, hand to hand, against Talleyrand and Na- 
poleon ! 

The negotiation was worthy of the negotiators. 
It was protracted for six montlis. All its objects 
might have been discussed in as many days. The 
ambassador was toyed and trifled with, in the most 
palpable and contemptuous manner. Sometimes he 
was refused an audience ; sometimes he was kept 
lingering for an answer ; sometimes passports for 
his couriers were delayed ; and at last passports for 
himself were withheld, until he must have begun se- 
riously to think that his embassy would end in Ver- 
dun. Europe looked on in surprise ; England in 
mingled indignation and laughter. 

It is only justice to a great man's memory, to re- 
lieve Fox from the responsibility of this continued 
burlesque. His bodily powers had been giving way 
from the commencement of the year; though the 
direct symptoms of his mortal disease were not yet 
discoverable. In a letter to a friend, soon after his 
accession to office, he said — " My life has been active 
beyond my strength ; I had almost said, my duty. 
If I have not acted much, you will allow I have 
spoken much; and I have felt more than I have eithei 
acted or spoken. My constitution has sunk under it. 
I find myself unequal to the business on which you 
have written ; it must be left to younger men." 

Napoleon and Talleyrand tossed those ambassadors 
between them like toys; their object was to gain 



1807.] THE WHIG CABINET. 249 

time ; and it was not till the actual hour when they 
had gathered the whole mass of destruction, which a 
touch was to let loose on Prussia, that they conde- 
scended to take the bandage from their eyes, and 
send them back to their insulted country. The ne- 
gotiation had begun on the 20th of February, 1806. 
Lord Lauderdale received his passports on the 6th of 
October; on the 9th, Napoleon was in sight of the 
Prussian army, and on the 14th he fought the fatal 
battle of Jena. In three hours he drove the Prussians 
from the field with the loss of 60,000 killed, wounded, 
and prisoners ; and followed up the battle iDy the cap- 
ture of all the Prussian soldiery, the surrender of all 
the fortresses, the seizure of the capital, and the pur- 
suit of the king, — the total subjugation of the Prus- 
sian monarchy ! Then was paid the long arrear of 
vengeance for the blood and chains of Poland. 

Fox was now dead, and the guidance of this disas- 
trous administration had fallen into the hands of Lord 
Grenville. No compassion was felt for the growing 
embarrassments of a man who had abandoned the 
principles of his master. The homourable portion of 
the country rejoiced to see the cabinet bewilder them- 
selves from day to day, until there was but one false 
step more to be made — and they made it. 

The whigs had come into power under a pledge 
to the Catholic question. They found the king ad- 
verse to its discussion. They endeavoured, in the 
first instance, to elude it, and yet retain the Catholics. 
They endeavoured, in the second, to grant it, and yet 
retain the king. They failed in both. The Catholics 
pronounced them deceivers : the king gave them that 
practical proof of his opinion, which of all things they 
dreaded most, — he dismissed them. And thus, in the 
midst of general joy, perished the coalition ministry; 
leaving no record of their existence, but in two bons 
mots of Sheridan. 

On Lord Henry Petty's iron-tax being withdrawn, 
some one suggested a tax on coals, to make up the 



250 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1807 

deficiency. " Poh," said Sheridan, " do you want 
to raise a rebellion in our kitchens ? The cooks are 
worse than the blacksmiths. Tax coals instead of 
iron ! that would be jumping out of the frying-pan 
into the ^re." 

But it was the Catholic question that excited hig 
chief displeasure. None more thoroughly knew the 
secret of cabinet sincerity. He looked upon the ques- 
tion as a tub to the whale, and had no forgiveness for 
the sport in which his own office was to be wrecked. 
" Why did they not put it off, as Fox did," said the 
angry ex-treasurer of the navy ; " I have heard of 
men running their heads against a wall ; but this is 
the first time I ever heard of men building a wall, and 
squaring it, and clamping it, for the express purpose 
of knocking out their brains against it." 

But the deed was done ; a Protestant ministry was 
established by the king. The coalition was totally 
broken down ; and Lord Grenville, exiled from power, 
never to return, was left to learn the bitter lesson, 
that no man can abandon even political professions 
with impunity. 

All the laurels on this occasion remained with the 
king. Those who doubted his capacity, were now 
brought to their senses by the fact, that he had ca- 
pacity enough to turn out the two most assuming 
administrations in the shortest time known. The 
Fox and North coalition, pronouncing itself an as- 
semblage of all the publip talent of England ; and the 
Fox and Grenville coalition, formed on the same con- 
tempt of public opinion, and making the same boast 
of matchless ability, were each turned out in little 
more than a year. The single step between " the 
sublime and the ridiculous,"* was never shorter than 
in the latter instance. Insolence is not made to be 
forgiven ; and the titles of " the broad-bottomed ad- 

* The pitby maxim on this subject, which has been so often given to 
Napoleon's knowledge of the world, belonged to Paine. His celebrated 
Bhrase, la nation boutiguiirei belonged to Barras. 



1807.] THE WHIG CABINET. 251 

ministration," and " All tlie talents," threw this con- 
clave of self-sufficiency into national ridicule. 

But it was the insincerity ih^t sharpened, as it ought, 
every weapon of public scorn. The pen and the pen- 
cil were equally keen ; and if popular applause were 
the object of ministerial dreams, never was vanity 
more universally chastised. 

The following lines were attributed to Canning : — 

ALL THE TALENTS. 

When the broad-hottomed junto, all nonsense and strife, 
Resign'd, with a groan, its political life ; 
When converted to Rome, and of honesty tired, 
It to Satan gave back what himself had inspired ; 

The Demon of Faction, that over them hung, 
In accents of anguish their epitaph sung ; 
While Pride and Venality joined in the stave, 
And canting Democracy wept on the grave. 

" Here lies in the tomb that we hollowed for Pitt, 
The consistence of Grenville, of Temple the wit, 
Of Sidmouth the firmness, the temper of Grey, 
And Treasurer Sheridan's promise to pay. 

Here Petty's finance, from the evils to come 

With Fitzpatrick's sobriety creeps to the tomb ; 

And Chancellor Ego,* now left in the lurch. 

Neither laughs at the law, nor cuts jokes on the church " 

Then huzza for the party that here's laid at rest — 
" All the talents," but self-praising blockheads at best : 
Though they sleep in oblivion, they've died with the hope, 
At the last day of freedom to rise with the Pope. 

The national feeling had been strongly aggrieved 
by the debate on giving a public monument to Pitt. 
On this occasion, it could not be expected that Fox 
should give any peculiar homage to a government 
which he had been opposing for so many years ; but 
his tribute to Pitt's personal abilities and virtues did 
himself honour. This manly example, however, was 
lost upon some of the speakers ; and Windham at- 
tracted no tnvial resentment by a volunteer attack 

* Erskine. 



253 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1807 

upon the memory of the great minister. It was a 
public cause, for England loved the name of Pitt, and 
looked upon it, as she still does, as a sacred part of 
her glory. Some stanzas of a poem which imbodied 
the general sentiment had unusual popularity : — 

ELIJAH'S MANTLE. 

When by th' Almighty's dread command, 
Elijah, call'd from Israel's land, 

Rose in the sacred flame, 
His mantle good Elisha caught, 
And, with the prophet's spirit fraught. 

Her second hope became. 

In Pitt our Israel saw combined 

The patriot's heart — the prophet's mind, 

Elijah's spirit here : 
Now, sad reverse .' — that spirit reft, 
No confidence, no hope is left ; 

For no Elisha 's near. 

Is there, among the greedy band 
Who seize on power with harpy baud, 
/ And patriot pride assume, 

One on whom public faith can rest- 
One fit to wear Elijah's vest. 
And cheer a nation's gloom ? 

Grenville ! — to aid thy treasury famCf 
A portion of Pitt's mantle claim, 

His generous ardour feel ; 
Resolve o'er sordid self to soar, 
Amid Exchequer gold be poor ; 

Thy wealth — the public weal. 

Windham I — if e'er thy sorrows flow 
For private loss or public wo, 

Thy rigid brow unbend ; 
Tears over Caesar Brutus shed ; 
His hatred warred not with the dead— 

And Pitt was once thy friend. 

Illustrious Roscius of the state ! 
New-breech'd and hamess'd for debate. 

Thou wonder of thy age ! 
Petty or Betty art thou hight, 
By Granta sent to strut thy night 

On Stephen's bustling stage. 

Pitt's 'Chequer robe 'tis thine to wear; 
Take of his mantle too a share, 

'Twill aid thy Ways and Means ; 



1808.] 



THE SPANISH WAR. 25)3 

And should Fat Jack and his cabal, 
Cry, '* Rob us the Exchequer, Hal !" 
Thou art but in thy teens. 

Sidmouth — though low his head is laid 
Who call'd thee from thy native shade. 

And gave thee second birth — 
Gave thee the sweets of power and place, 
The tufted gown, the gilded mace, 

And rear'd thy nameless worth ; 

Think how his mantle wrapp'd thee ronnd: 
Is one of equal virtue found 

Among thy new compeers ? 
Or can thy cloak of Amiens stuff. 
Once laugh'd to scorn by Blue and Buff, 

Screen thee from Windham's jeers ? 

When Faction threaten'd Britain's land, 
Thy new-made friends — a desperate band. 

Like Ahab, stood reproved : 
Pitt's powerful tongue their rage could check , 
His counsel saved, mid mankind's wreck,, 

The Israel that he loved. 

Yes, honour'd shade ! while near thy grave, 
The letter'd sage, and chieftain brave, 

The votive marble claim ; 
O'er thy cold corse — the public tear 
Congeal'd, a crystal shrine shall rear, 

Unsullied as thy fame. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

The Spanish War. 



The deliverance of Europe began, when, to human 
eyes, it was ruined beyond hope. The continent 
was at peace — the dreadful peace of slavery. The 
gword was the only instrument of dominion. The 
final struggle had been made, for even that mutilated 
independence which nations cotild enjoy, in perpe- 



254 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1808. 

tual terror of a French army ; and watching, with fe- 
verish anxiety, every sign of wrath from a man of 
blood and avarice, capricious as the winds, and 
steady only to the one desperate purpose of turning 
the world into a French dungeon. 

The strength of the allies had been successively 
tried, and found wanting: Austria had been over- 
whelmed in a three months' campaign ;* Prussia in 
a day. The Russian armies had been driven back 
on their own territory ; and even their partial escape 
was soon turned into worse than defeat, by the rash 
and ignominious treaty of Tilsit. In 1807, Napoleon 
possessed a power unequalled in extent by any mo- 
narchy since the time of Charles V., and immeasura- 
bly superior to his in point of effective strength, of 
opulence, intelligence, and the facility of being di- 
rected to any purpose of his ambition. No Euro- 
pean sovereign ever possessed such personal supre- 
macy over the means and minds of his subjects. 
France was a great camp ; the people were an army ; 
the government was as simple, rigid, and unques- 
tioned, as the command of a brigade ; and Napoleon ; 
was the general-in-chief. His business was, to cam- 
paign against Europe ; and when the campaign was 
done, his leisure was employed, or amused, in dis- 
tributing its provinces and crowns to his soldiers. 

In the pause after the overthrow of Russia at 
Golomyn and Pultusk, he divided his conquests. He 
gave the crown of Holland to Louis, his brother; 
annexing Venice to the kingdom of Italy,, he g^ve 
the whole to his stepson, Beauharnois, as viceroy; 
he (gave the kingdom of Naples to Joseph, his bro- 
ther ; Berg and Cleves to Murat, his brother-in-law ; 
Guastalla to Prince Borghese, another brother-in- 
law; the principalities of Neufchatel and Ponte- 
Corvo to Berthier and Bernadotte; repaid the civil 
services of Talleyrand with Benevento ; and when 

* Closed at Austerlitz, December 86, 1806. 



1808.] THE SPANISH WAR. 255 

this was done, resumed his preparations for the sei- 
zure of Spain, Portug-al, and Poland ! 

England was still unconquerable ; but she had 
been severely tried. Her eflforts to sustain the cause 
of Europe had pressed heavily upon her strength. 
She had paid all the allied armies ; and lavished her 
wealth with no return but that of seeing the conti- 
nent laid at the foot of the enemy. But the strug- 
gle had been at a distance ; it was now to be brought 
home. 

By the most extraordinary measure in the annals 
of hostility, the Berlin and Milan decrees, a line of 
fire was to be draM^n round the continent, and Eng- 
land excluded from the intercourse of nation^. Na- 
poleon had felt from the beginning that this country 
was the great antagonist with whom, sooner or later, 
be must cope for existence. His object was univer- 
sal despotism : but the continent could not be finally 
enslaved while there was still one land, from which 
the words of freedom and courage were perpetually 
echoing in the general ear; whose trumpet was 
sounding to every dejected heart of the patriot and 
the soldier; and whose proud security, fearless opu- 
lence, and perfect enjoyment of peace, in the midst 
of the convulsions of the world, gave unanswerable 
evidence that freedom was worth the highest sacri- 
fices that could be made by man. 

England was inaccessible to the arms of Napo- 
leon, and his arts were now sufficiently known : but 
if her spirit was not to be humbled, her resources 
might be dried up ; and to this project he applied 
himself with the singular perseverance and reckless- 
ness of his nature. He knew that the first evil must 
fall upon himself ; for the whole of the immense line 
of coast stretching from the Meuse t-o the Vistula, lived 
upon English commerce ; and on the plunder of 
those provinces depended a large portion of the 
French revenue. But, at all risks, England was to 
be ruined. When the deputies from Hamburgh repre- 



256 GEOEGE THE FOURTH. [1808. 

sented to him the havoc that the Berlin and Milan 
decrees were making in their city, his answer was 
the brief one of a military tyrant : — " What is that 
to me 1 The war must not go on for ever. — You suf- 
fer only like the rest. English commerce must be 
destroyed." 

This answer was the signal of universal bank- 
ruptcy. The recollections of that period in Ger- 
many amount to the tragic and the terrible. Per- 
haps no single act of tyranny had ever inflicted such 
sweeping misery upon mankind. The whole frame 
of society was rent asunder, as by a thunderstroke. 
Property was instantly valueless, or a source of per- 
secution. The merchandise which had been pur- 
chased but the day before, under the sanction of the 
French authorities, and paid every impost levied by 
the devouring crowd of prefects and plunderers, was 
torn from the warehouses, and burned before the 
unfortunate proprietors' eyes. 

The casual stagnations of trade, or the change of 
popular taste for a manufacture, are always the 
source of miserable suffering. But here was more 
than stagnation or change : it was utter ruin, with- 
out a hope of recovery. The result was inevitable 
and dreadful. Thousands and tens of thousands 
were thrown loose upon the world, with all their 
knowledge useless, their habits broken up, and their 
prospects destroyed. The great merchant dismissed 
his clerks, shut his doors, and lived upon his decaying 
capital ; and even then lived in hourly expectation 
of some new forced loan, which should send him to 
beg in the streets. The inferior ranks of trade were 
undone at once ; and sank into paupers, living on the 
charity of the French barracks. Germany was one 
immense poor-house. But within a short period 
the humblest resources of poverty failed ; the funds 
of the old charitable institutions either fell into de- 
cay, or were seized on by the merciless rapacity of 
the invader. Orphans, and old people, and even the 



1808.] THE SPANISH WAR. 257 

iunatic and idiot, were driven into the fields, to take 
their chance with the beasts of the earth and the 
fowls of the air. Time and season made no differ- 
ence with this hideous tyranny. Hospitals have been 
emptied of their unfortunate tenants at the point of 
the bayonet, in the depth of a German winter ; and the 
blind and the bedrid, the paralytic, the fevered, the 
wounded, and the mad, cast out to scatter them- 
selves over a wilderness of snow, and die. 

Then came the conscription, another and a still 
more heart-breaking scourge. In all the territories 
amiexed to France the yearly drawing, or some 
equivalent levy, was imposed. As a tax it was 
ruinous, for the price of a substitute was frequently 
equal to five hundred pounds sterling; and even 
where a wretched family had wrung this sum from 
their last means, to save a son or a brother from 
the hazards of Napoleon's sanguinary warfare, the 
death or desertion of the substitute, both hourly oc- 
curring, brought a new demand on the conscript, and 
he must march. The acceptance of a substitute was 
itself an imperial favour, generally paid for at a high 
rate to the French agents ; and the difficulty, in all 
cases, was so great that nearly the whole youth of 
the country were compelled to serve in person. No 
language can exaggerate the wretchedness of mind 
felt by the families of those devoted young men, when 
every day brought accounts of some desperate ac- 
tion, — or hurried march, scarcely less ruinous than 
battle, — or frightful contagion, breaking out in the 
desolated scenes of the campaign, and extinguish- 
ing the survivors of the field by multitudes. 

But the conscription was not limited to a yearly 
slaughter. The first Russian campaign cost three 
conscriptions, each of eighty thousand men; and 
they were almost totally destroyed by the enemy, 
the inclemency of a Polish winter, and the miseries 
of the French hospitals. Yet the evil of the system 
went deeper than the casualties of the fields I'he 

Y2 



258 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1808. 

boy of eighteen, suddenly thrown into contact with 
the profligacy of a camp, was vitiated for life : he 
saw before him, from day to day, every temptation 
that can stimulate the hot passions of man, and every 
horror that can harden the heart ; he lived in the 
midst of plunder, bloodshed, and promiscuous vice ; 
until the sabre or the cannon-ball came to sweep him 
out of hfe, he was master of all that he cast his eyes 
upon ; and the brief tenure of the possession only 
inflamed his guilty appetites the more. " Let us eat 
and drink, for to-morrow we die," never was realized 
with such furious license as in the campaigns of the 
French imperial army. The soldier rushed on in a 
perpetual whirlwind of revelry, robbery, and blood. 

The natural consequence was, that famihes looked 
upon their sons as mere food for the sword ; and ut- 
terly neglected the morals, religion., and education 
which were so soon to be made useless by massacre. 
The few parents who persevered in doing their duty, 
watched, with agony, every fluctuation of the war, 
and lived in constant dread of the moment when they 
should be called on to surrender their children to 
death, or to what must be, in the mind of the wise 
and virtuous, worse than death. Even where the 
sword had mercy, no man could expect to see his 
son return the being that he had sent him : he saw 
him dismembered by wounds and disease, an encum- 
brance to himself and the world ; or bringing back 
the deep corruptions of the soldier's life ; contempt- 
uous of morals and religion, a restless profligate, 
unfit for any one of the rational enjoyments or ge- 
nerous labours of society, and longing only for the 
fierce excesses of the field again. * 

But this spectacle was seldom allowed. The wars 
of Napoleon were computed to have cost France 
more than two millions of men ; they mowed down 
the whole rising generation. " I can afford ten thou- 
sand men a-day," was said to be the boast of this 
iron homicide. Nothing struck the eye of the tra- 



1808.] THE SPANISH WAR. 259 

veller more than the almost total deficiency of 
youth in France. " R rCy a point de jeunesse,''^ was 
the universal remark of the allies, on their march 
through the provinces. The consummate plague of 
the Egyptians, the last wrath of heaven, had been 
the first infliction of France on herself : she felt the 
universal smiting of the first-born ; " there was not 
a house where there was not one dead." 

But if France was chastised, the whole immense 
extent of the conquered provinces, formedinto French 
departments, or given as appanages to some worth- 
less relative or court-slave, was tortured. A system 
of espionage Avas established, subtle, and subversive 
of all the best feelings of society to a fatal degree. 
Like another scriptural curse, " A man's chief ene- 
mies were those of his own household." The sim- 
plest word uttered before a menial, or even a relative, 
might be made the subject of an accusation that cost 
a life. Even the bordering kingdoms, which enjoyed 
a nominal independence, were visited by this plague. 
It was a maxim — that no individual was safe within 
three days' march of a French garrison ! The con- 
tinent, from the Channel to the confines of Russia, 
was tormented with surveillance. Throughout three- 
fourths of Europe, no man could be sure that he 
would ever eat another meal under his own roof. 
No man, laying down his head on his pillow, 
could be sure that he would not be startled before 
morn by some frightful domiciliary visit, under the 
pretext of searching for English merchandise, but, 
in reality, for his own seizure ; or that he would not 
be whirled away to some fortress from Avhich he was 
never to emerge, — or emerge, only to be brought to 
a mock trial at Milan, or Mantua, or Paris, and perish 
before a military tribunal ! The French mob had 
demolished one Bastile, and found in it but one pri- 
• soner. Napoleon created eight Bastiles ; and the 
list of his state prisoners amounted to hundreds • 
those were never to be liberated. The imprisoned 



260 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1808. 

for minor offences, chiefly on political suspicion, 
were ascertained, on the fall of the empire, to be up- 
wards of fifty thousand ! Such are the lessons of 
g-overnment given by a legislator from the field. 

It is to the honour of England, or rather of that 
freedom which supplies nerve and virtue to a people, 
that her determination never gave way. Yet the 
evils of protracted hostility were now pressing on 
her with a weight which it required all her fortitude to 
sustain. The vividness of actual conflict was gone. 
There was no enemy on the seas to animate her with 
new triumph ; war on land was hopeless against the 
bulwark of steel that fenced the empire and the vas- 
sals of Napoleon. Her pillars of state and war had 
fallen, — Pitt, Fox, and Nelson, — within a few months 
of each other. The Berlin and Milan decrees, after 
working their indescribable ruin on the continent, 
were gradually sapping her commerce. The enemy 
had at last detected the vulnerable part o f her strength ; 
and England was now less a vigorous and warlike 
nation, fighting her enemy round the globe, and 
striking active blows wherever he was to be found ; 
than a great blockaded garrison, waiting within its 
walls for the attack, forced to husband its materials 
of support, and preparing to display the last powers 
of passive fortitude. 

In this crisis, — when all hope of change had va- 
nished ; when, unquestionably, mere valour and en- 
ergy had done their utmost ; and slavery or eternal 
war seemed to be the only alternative of nations, — 
an interposition, a single event, unexpected as the 
descent of a spirit of heaven, threw a sudden light 
across Europe and summoned the day. 

It does not derogate from this high deliverance, 
which we will believe to have been providential, that 
it acted by human passions. The profligate habits 
of the Spanish court had suffered Godoy, an adven- 
turer, to rise to eminence. The king was a man of 
weak understanding, — the queen was a libertine, — 



1808.] THE SPANISH WAR. 261 

and Godoy was the open ruler of both. But even in 
Spain, sunk as it was in the deepest slough of indo- 
lence, and kept down there by the heel of the most 
sullen and jealous superstition that ever oppressed 
the human mind, there were curses, deep yet loud 
enough to reach, from time to time, the ear of the 
minister, and make him anxious to provide some su- 
preme power safer from the knife and the poison. 
He proposed the partition of Portugal to Napoleon, 
securing to himself the province of Alentejo in sove- 
reignty, as a recompense for conniving at the march 
of the French army through Spain. But he had to 
deal with one whose sagacity foresaw every thing, 
and whose ambition grasped at every thing. Napo- 
leon seized Portugal, and gave the traitor no share. 
The treaty of Tilsit, in 1807, relieved him from the 
chances of northern war, and he next turned upon 
Spain. The tissue of artifice which he wound round 
the nerveless understanding of the Spanish court is 
unrivalled. He alternately sided with the Prince of 
Asturias against the king, with the king against the 
prince, and with both against Godoy ; until, by mere 
dexterity, he induced king, queen, prince, and Godoy 
quietly to give themselves up to him, walk into his 
prisons, and leave the Spanish throne at his disposal. 
But there was a scene of blood to come. Those 
royal imbeciles were not worth his fury, they had 
felt but the velvet of the tiger's paw ; others were 
to feel its talons; and they were instantly darted at 
the throat of Spain. The first announcement of 
French dominion in the capital was by a massacre ! 
Then awoke the feelings that God has treasured in 
the heart of man, to save him from the last degrada- 
tion. That day's blood dyed the robe of the usurper 
with a colour never to be washed away. The 
ten millions of Spain rose as one man. Without 
leaders, without arms, without military experience, 
concert, or knowledge, they rushed upon the inva- 
ders, and overthrew them like a hurricane. The 



263 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1808 

French veterans, who had seen the flight of all the 
disciplined armies of Europe with their princes at 
their head, were routed and slaughtered by shep- 
herds and tillers of the ground, by women and chil- 
dren ; with no other fortresses than the rocks, no 
other allies than the soil and sky, and no other 
arms than the first rustic implement that could be 
caught up for the destruction of a murderer. 

It is only due to the feelings of England to de- 
clare, that the whole nation rejoiced disinterestedly 
in this proud attitude of Spain. Whatever might be 
the advantages of thus recommencing the contest 
with Napoleon, on a new field, and assisted by aux- 
iliaries in whose cause every heart of Europe sym- 
pathized, the first and strongest impulse was an un- 
selfish desire to support the peninsula to the last 
shilling and last soldier of the kingdom. 

Napoleon had long ascended to a height from 
which he might look down upon the diadems of Eu- 
rope ; but, as if to point the moral of ambition, he 
was yet suffered, for a moment, to enjoy an actual 
indulgence and personal splendour of sovereignty, 
to which all the earlier pomps of his empire were 
pale. He now sat down to a banquet of kingship, 
and feasted to the full ; while an eye which glanced 
through the future would have seen his throne 
smitten under him, and his name a by-word among 
nations. But, for the moment, Europe had never 
witnessed so magnificent a spectacle of dominion as 
Napoleon's court at Erfurt. He was surrounded by 
the monarchs and princes of the continent in person. 

The emperor of Russia with his brother Constan- 
tine, daily attended his levees ; the emperor of Aus- 
tria sent an ambassador to apologize for his absence 
at the feet of this universal king ; all the first mili- 
tary and noble names of Europe, marshals, dukes, 
princes, and prelates, formed his circle. The days 
were spent in the occupations suitable to this dis- 
play of royalty ; in riding over fields of battle, nego- 



1809. J THE SPANISH WAR. 263 

tiating treaties, and deciding* the fates of kingdoms. 
Prussia was forgiven, at the intercession of Alex- 
ander ; a new code was vouchsafed to Holland ; a 
peace was proposed to England, — which she firmly 
refused, unless it should include the freedom of 
Spain ; and the German powers were haughtily com- 
manded to be still and obey. No human being could 
feel this homage with a keener zest than Napoleon 
himself. The long possession of a throne had not 
deadened the slightest nerve of his sense of supre- 
macy ; — " Come and play at Erfurt," he wrote to 
Talma, with the loftiest sneer, — " you shall play be- 
fore Sipitful qfkings.'*^ 

He broke up the conference, to pour an army of 
two hundred thousand men upon Spain. i 

1809. — The Spanish war teemed with great les- 
sons ; and the first was, that the only security against 
public ruin is a free constitution. It would have 
saved Spain from that miserable spectacle of a de- 
praved and effeminate court, a domineering priest- 
hood, and a decaying people, which invited an in- 
vader ; and it would have not less supplied the only 
strength which renders a country unconquerable. 
The enthusiasm of the Spanish peasantry was be- 
yond all praise ; but it expired in a year. Joseph 
Buonaparte, " the intrusive king," as he was named 
by his indignant subjects, returned to Madrid ; and 
Napoleon, after having brushed away the undisci- 
plined levies of the juntas, as his charger would a 
swarm of flies, rode through the peninsula at his 
ease. 

In one comer of Spain alone he found resistance, 
a foretaste of that fiery valour which was yet to cost 
him his diadem. The corps under Moore, after 
having been endangered alternately by the treason 
of the Spanish chief, the rashness of the British 
envoy, and the perplexity of the British general, had 
at length retired upon Galicia. Napoleon, who felt 
at all times a personal exasperation against Eng- 



264 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1809. 

land, determined to strike a blow at hct heart, by 
utterly crusMng this corps: in his own ruthless 
phrase, — " he would put all the wives and mothers 
of England into mourning." He thundered after 
Moore with a force of forty thousand men. 

But he found that the British soldier and sailor 
were men of the same blood; the spirit of Trafalgar 
was before him. He ought to have exting dished the 
retreating army at once : his number amounted to 
nearly three times theirs : he had all the advantages 
of command of the country, unlimited resources, high 
equipment, troops flushed with uncontested victory, 
and, more than all, his own mighty name : before 
him was a small body of men, hopeless of I he con- 
test, disgusted with the country, uncertain of their 
general, and in retreat — a word, that of itself throws 
a damp upon the soldier, and pre-eminently upon the 
soldier of England. Yet upon that little army the 
conqueror of the continent was never able to make 
the slightest impression. The elements fought 
against them ; the rains and snows threw their bat- 
talions into disorder ; famine unnerved them ; but 
they felt no other victors. The wild mountains and 
dreary defiles of Galicia, proverbial for barrenness, 
were covered with the dying and the dead, the wreck 
of the British army, wasted by night-marches, hun- 
ger, weariness, and despair : but the bold spirit sur- 
vived; the sound of a French gmi was as the sound 
of a trumpet ; the mutnious were instantly restored 
to order, the fugitive returned, the wounded forgot 
their wounds, the famished and the dying started 
from the ground, gathered their last strength, and 
died with the musket in their hands. 

Napoleon's sagacity did not fail him here. A few 
rencounters of the British rear-guard with the ^lite of 
his troops, soon convinced him that at least no glory 
was to be gained by the pursuit: and after a brief but 
gallant cavalry action, in which Lords Stewart and 
Paget broke the s(jmadrons of his favourite regiment 



1809.] 



THE SPANISH WAR. 265 



of guards,* and at which he was said to have been 
present; he turned away to easier triumphs, and 
committed to Soult the rough experiment of " driv- 
ing the British into the sea." As it was his habitual 
policy to keep the marshal's baton at a sufficient 
distance from the sceptre ; he had, probably, no dis- 
inclination to see Soult's pride, which had already 
given him some disturbance in Portugal, slightly 
lectured by the English sword. He now left him to 
pursue fortune to the borders of the English element. 
Never was commander more batHed. He was un- 
able to gain a single advantage in the most disas- 
trous march of the war. Moore reached Corunna, 
with his army in a state of almost total ruin ; with- 
out cavalry, artillery, or baggage ; without tents, 
shoes, medicine, money, or food. They had ex- 
pected to find provisions on the road, — they found 
every hut deserted ; the fleet was to have been ready 
to receive them at Corunna, — from the heights they 
could not see a sail round the horizon. 

The Spaniards had nothing in their magazines but 

» This action delighted the French infantry. They saw every feature 
of it from the heights, and were rejoiced at the defeat of the guard. The 
French cavalry had assumed that air of superiority over the other 
branches of the service, which those branches, in all countries, so natu- 
rally repay with dislike ; and the cavalry of the imperial guard were 
only the more remarkable for this military coxcombry. They added to 
their pride in themselves and their horses, in their mustaches, and the 
vulgar mummeries of court soldiership, demands of a choice of quarters, 
and other privileges, which excited the gall of the regiments of the line 
more than their tinsel and feathers. 

On this occasion, they had rode down, under Le Clerc, a favourite 
aid-de camp of the emperor, to " annihilate the English ;" for their con- 
tempt of our dismantled troops was in the highest tone. The whole 
French camp ran out to see this easy victory. They were not kept long 
in suspense ; the British hussars made quick work of it ; they no sooner 
saw the showy garde, than they dashed at them, broke them in all 
directions, drove one part back through the river, and made the rest, with 
their general, prisoners. The fugitives, on reascending the hill, were 
received with a general shout of scorn by the infantry ; taunted with all 
kinds of insolent questions, and asked " how they liked annihilating the 
enemy 1" — " whether they were pleased with the cold bath after their pro- 
menade V — and, above all, " what quarters they would prefer for the 
night 1" The guards were in no condition to retort, but sullenly rode to 
the rear, and were liazarded no more in skirmiahes. 

z 



266 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1809 

brandy, which made them phrensied and furious ; or 
the impoverished wine of the- province, which pro- 
duced disorders. But the sight of the French co- 
lumns overtopping the heights round Corunna, made 
them soldiers once more. They bore the shock of 
their well-appointed antagonists with national forti- 
tude, rushed upon them in return, with half their 
numbers drove them back on every point, and, co- 
vering the ground with slaughter, remained masters of 
the field. Moore fell, in the moment of victory, can- 
celling all his errors by his gallant death, and earn- 
ing for himself a record in the hearts of his countiy- 
men. The army embarked without a shot being fired 
by the enemy. Soult had received too severe a les- 
son to hazard a second trial. The lion had turned 
round on the hunter, given him a grasp that paralyzed 
him, and then walked quietly away. 

The Spanish war lingered. The enthusiasm of the 
multitude must always be transitory. Their means 
of life are too dependent on daily exertion, and too 
much exposed to an invader, to make them capable 
of long enduring a warfare in the bosom of the land. 
The beginning of the second campaign found the in- 
surrection melted away, the enemy masters of the 
chief cities, and the people in despair. The hatred 
subsisted ; but the lofty passion, the valour in the 
field, and the zeal of public sacrifice, were gone. — 
The dagger was freely substituted for the sword ; 
and the blood of Frenchman and Spaniard was spilled 
in the gloomy and useless interchanges of private 
vengeance and military retribution. 

Now was fulfilled the evil of a despotic govern- 
ment. It is the instinct of all despotisms to extinguish 
individual character. They have no fear of a gene- 
ration of nobles, such as cling to the skirts of foreign 
courts, fed on the emoluments of fictitious offices, 
and content to discover dignity in stars and strings. 
They have no fear of a peasantiy, who are too re- 
mote, and too busy in toiling for their daily bread, to 



1809.] THE SPANISH WAR. 267 

be objects of alarm. But their terror is the middle 
order, — the natural deposite of the virtue, manliness, 
and vigour of a state ; the trunk of the tree, which 
both root and leaf were created to feed, and without 
which they would both be but cumberers of the 
ground. 

There was no middle order in Spain. A Roman 
Catholic throne and priesthood had long trampled it 
into the grave. For centuries, every vigorous intel- 
lect or free spirit that started up in Spain, had ex- 
piated its offence by the dungeons of the Inquisition, 
or death. The hour of national peril came ; the hero 
and the statesman were then wildly called for, but 
the call was unanswered ; they were not in exist- 
ence ; the soul was in the grave, or on the winds ; 
and Spain, once so admirable for the brilliancy of its 
warlike and political genius, exhibited the extraordi- 
nary reverse, of ten millions of brave men without 
a soldier to lead them, and juntas and councils in 
every province without a statesman capable of direct- 
ing them to any measure of common wisdom. The 
burden soon fell on the "British, and it was heroically 
sustained. But the successes of the peninsular war 
are too familiar to be detailed here. Six years of 
almost uninterrupted campaigns, in which all the re- 
sources of the art of war were displayed on both 
sides, proved that England could be as invmcible by 
land as on the ocean, placed the Duke of Welling- 
ton in a rank with Marlborough, planted the British 
standard in France for the first time since the Hen- 
ries and Edwards, and gave the first blow, within his 
own frontiers, to the hitherto unchecked and unri- 
valled career of Napoleon. 

The British army alone had interposed between 
Spain and total slavery. For some years its strength 
was inadequate to the extent of the field, and to the 
Vast resources of the French empire. But a large 
share of its difficulties arose from the Spaniards 
themselves. The successive parties which assumed 



268 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1809. 

the government were found equally feeble. The 
spirit of the juntas was timid, frivolous, and formal- 
izing. With the most worthless part of national 
pride, they felt it an insult to be saved by the sword 
of strangers ; with the lowest part of national pru- 
dence, they dreaded to irritate the enemy by defeat- 
ing him. They hated the French, but they would 
not be helped by the English, and they could not help 
themselves. In this decrepitude, they solaced their 
wounded vanity by satires and ballads, determina- 
tions of future heroism, and the grand recollection — • 
that their forefatliers had expelled the Moors, though 
the feat had cost them three hundred years ! 

Those absurdities should be remembered for higher 
purposes than ridicule. They show how totally the 
spirit of a grave and high-hearted people may be 
perverted by a false system of government. The 
old, generous virtue of the Spanish soil had now 
force enough only to throw up those flaunting weeds. 
With liberty, it had lost the rich productiveness of 
liberty. The juntas differed from the courtiers of 
the Philips and Ferdinands in nothing but a cockade. 

A few years saw them sink into insignificance ; and 
they merited their fate. They had made no use of 
the highest advantages of their connexion with Eng- 
land. From the gieat land of freedom, literature, 
and religion, they borrowed nothing but money and 
arms. They shrank from the natural and only means 
of renovating the national heart. While Spain was 
under the foot of her enemy, with the blood gushing 
from a thousand wounds, they would suffer no infu- 
sion of that Uving stream of health and virtue which 
glowed under the impregnable corslet of England. — • 
They turned away their purblind eyes from the splen- 
dours which should have taught them to see; and 
abjured her press, her legislature, and, above all, 
her religion. The cry of " Heresy" was as keen 
as in the days of Loyola. They dug up the bodies 
of the English soldiers, as unworthy to sleep in the 



1811.] THE REGENCY. 269 

same clay with a Spaniard. They repelled and sup- 
pressed the Bible ! that first book which a true legis- 
lator would put into the hands of his people, even as 
the noblest manual of patriotism. 

All the art of man was never able to reconcile re- 
ligious slavery with civil freedom. What can be the 
independence of him who, but by the permission of 
a priest, dares not read the Bible — that first and most 
perennial source of freedom ; that highest fount of 
stainless principle, unhesitating courage, and fidelity 
strong as the grave ; which, while it ministers, be- 
yond all philosophy, to the contentment of a private 
career, and divests the bosom of all eagerness for the 
trivial and vanishing distinctions of public life, yet 
lays every man under the responsibility of exerting 
his best powers for the public good ; that book, which, 
teaching him to be zealous without violence, and 
aspiring without ambition, and filling his mind with 
calmer and loftier contemplations than the unsub- 
stantial visions of earth, prepares him to look with 
composure on the severest sacrifices, solicit no other 
praise than the testimony of his own conscience, 
and silently devote himself to the cause of man, and 
of that mighty Being who will not suffer him to be 
tempted beyond his power. 



CHAPTER XV. 

The Regency. 

The Prince of Wales, after a long retirement from 
public life, was recalled by an event which created 
the deepest sorrow throughout the empire. The 
affliction which, in 1788, had made the king incapa- 
ble of government, was announced to have returned.* 

♦ October 25, 1810. 

Z3 



270 GEORGE THE FOTTRTH. [1811 

A Regency bill, with restrictions, to last for a year 
was passed. The more than useless bitterness of 
the old contest was not renewed; its Leaders had 
perished; a judicious declaration that the piince, 
from respect to the king-, would make no immediate 
change in the ministry, at once quieted fears and 
extinguished hopes ; and, with all resistance at home 
conquered, or neutralized, he entered upon the great 
office of regent of a dominion extending through 
every quarter of the globe, numbering one hundred 
millions of people, and constituting the grand re- 
source of liberty, knowledge, and religion to man- 
kind. 

The reign of George the Third was now at an end, 
for though nominally monarch, he never resumed the 
throne. The lucid intervals of his malady soon 
ceased, and the last ten years of his life were passed 
in dreams. Perhaps this affliction, from which 
human nature shrinks with such terror, was meant in 
mercy. He had lost his sight some years before ; and 
blindness, a fearful privation to all, must have been a 
peculiar suffering to one so remarkable for his habits 
of diligence and activity. The successive deaths of 
those whom we love, are the bitter portion of age ; 
and in the course of a few years the king must have 
seen the graves of his queen, his son, and of that 
granddaughter, whose early death broke off the 
lineal succession of his throne. It is gratifying to 
the recollections which still adhere to this honest 
and good king, to believe that, in his solitude, he 
escaped the sense of those misfortunes. The mind, 
*' of imagination all compact," is not to be reached 
by exterior calamities. All that human care could 
provide for the comfort of his age was sacredly at- 
tended to. A letter from the Princess Elizabeth to 
Lady Suffolk, one of the former suite of the royal 
family, states — "that his majesty seemed to feel 
perfect happiness ; he seemed to consider himself no 
longer as an inhabitant of earth, and often^ when she 



1811.] THE REGENCY. 271 

played one of his favourite tunes, observed, that he 
was very fond of it when he was in the world. He 
spoke of the queen and all his family, and hoped that 
they were happy now, for he was much attached to 
them when in the world." 

The character of George the Third was peculiarly 
English. Manly, plain, and pious in his individual 
habits, he was high-minded, bold, and indefatigable 
in maintaining the rights of his people and the honour 
of his crown. He was " every inch a king !" 

The sovereign of England differs in his office and 
spirit from all others ; he is not an idol, to be shown 
forth only in some great periodic solemnity, and 
then laid up in stately uselessness ; but a living and 
active agent, called to mingle among the hearts and 
bosoms of men ; not a gilded bauble on the summit 
of the constitution, but a part of the solid architec- 
ture, a chief pillar of the dome. If this increase 
his sphere of duty, and compel him often to feel that 
he is but a man, it increases his strength and secu- 
rity. The independence of other monarchs may 
seem more complete, but history is full of examples 
of its precariousness ; it is the independence of an 
amputated limb. The connexion of an English king 
with his people is the connexion of a common life, 
the same constitutional current running through the 
veins of all, a communion of feelings and necessi- 
ties, which, if it compel the king to take a share in 
the anxieties of the people, returns it largely by 
compelling the people to take a vital interest in the 
honour and safety of the king. Placed by the law at 
the head of the commonwealth, he excites and enjoys 
the most remote circulation of its fame, wealth, and 
freedom; he is the highest and noblest organ of 
public sensation, but, for every impulse which he 
communicates, he receives vigour in return. " Agitat 
tnolern, magnoque se corpore miscety 

No sovereign of England was ever more a mo- 
narch, in this sense of public care, than George the 



272 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1811, 

Third: he was altogether a creature of the common- 
wealth ; his personal choice appointed his ministers, 
he sat in their councils, all their proceedings came 
under his revision ; he knew nothing of favouritism 
nor party ; and indulging a natural and generous in- 
terest in the fortunes of his friends to the last, he 
threw off with his boyhood the predilections of the 
boy, and thenceforth suffered no personal feelings 
to impede the business of the country. 

The king's qualities were subjected to three stem 
successive tests, each exhibiting him in a different 
point of view, and eacli rising above the other in 
difficulty. He was thus tried as an individual, as 
an English monarch, and as the head of the Euro- 
pean confederacy of thrones. 

In the early part of his reign, the royal person was 
the first object of attack. All parties professed 
themselves ahke zealous for the constitution, but 
the haters of government struck at the sitter on the 
throne. Ministers rose and fell too rapidly to make 
them a sufficient mark; thc'libel which would have 
been wasted upon those shadows, was levelled at 
the master who summoned them ; and the manli- 
ness with which the king stood forward to take upon 
himself the responsibility of government, exposed 
him to every shaft of malice, disappointment, and 
revenge. 

But assailants like those are born to perish ; and 
the name of Wilkes alone survives, preserved, doubt- 
less, by the real services which he involuntarily ren- 
dered to the constitution. Wilkes would have been 
a courtier by inclination, if he had not been a dema- 
gogue by necessity. Witty, subtle, and licentious, 
he would have glittered as an appendage to the court 
of Charles the Second; but the severe virtues of 
George the Third drove him to the populace. Yet 
he was altogether different from those who have 
since influenced the multitude. He had no natural 
gravitation to the mob : if he submitted to their con- 



1811.] THE REGENCY. 273^ 

tact, itwas, like Coriolanus, for their "voices;" it 
was to be carried by them in triumph, that he conde- 
scended to trust himself in their hands. His object 
was less to overthrow the higher ranks, than to force 
his way among them; less to raise an unknown 
name by flinging his firebrand into the temple of the 
constitution, than to menace government until it 
purchased off the incendiary ; he had no internecine 
hatred of all that was above him in genius, birth, or 
fortune. 

But, culprit as he was, there was grave occasion 
for him at the time. All power loves increase ; an 
arbitrary spirit was creeping on the constitution ; 
that spirit which, like the toad at the ear of our first 
parents, is content to come in ttie meanest shape, 
but which contains within itself the powers of a 
giant armed. The prerogative which had been 
wrested from the throne was usurped by the minis- 
ter, and a secretary of state's warrant differed from 
a lettre de cachet only in name. While those com- 
mittals were valid, no man was secure ; and liberty 
must either have perished, or been restored by the 
desperate remedy of a revolution. Wilkes fought 
this battle at his own risk, for the country; and, 
selfish as his patriotism was, the service deserves 
not to be forgotten. 

But, from this crisis the king came out unstained. 
Neither the crime nor the resistance was his. And 
in that calmer hour which, soon or late, comes to 
all men, Wilkes, satisfied and old, and with leisure 
to repent of faction, was in the habit of offering a 
ready homage to the virtues and sincerity of the 
king. 

After a few years the king was summoned to war 
by the revolt of America. The success of that re- 
volt cannot justify it. If the colonies were oppressed, 
the oppression was retracted, and they were offered 
even more than they had ever asked. But their ob- 
ject had speedily grown, from relief into rebellion, 

* See Note IV.— Pag-e 413, 



^.■. 



274 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1811. 

and from alliance into independence ; eventually, a 
fortunate result for England, which might have seen 
the constitution overthrown by the weight of Ame- 
rican patronage. 

We are not to judge of the wisdom that undertook 
the war, by its conduct in inferior hands. But the 
contest was altogether new, and fitted to be the dis- 
grace of political and military calculation, the " op- 
rohrium regalis medicincey The tactics of a pea- 
sant war were an unsolved problem in the science. 
The strength of army against army might be calcu- 
lated; but where was the arithmetic for the wilder- 
ness, for the swamp, the impenetrable forest, and 
the malignant sky ? But, while the struggle was in 
suspense, a new antagonist appeared. France, in 
short-sighted jealousy of England, broke her trea- 
ties, and ranged herself on the enemy's side; ty- 
ranny and democracy formed that singular alliance 
which was so fiercely repaid on the French throne. 
But the war was concluded. The king's duty had 
been done : he was not to see tamely the dismem- 
berment of his empire. When the transaction was 
complete, the same duty made him acquiesce in the 
fate of battle. 

Yet, this partial reverse was suddenly and magni- 
ficently compensated to England by her triumphs 
over France and Spain. The defeats of the enemy's 
fleets were memorable ; and the thunders of her vic- 
tory had scarcely died on the Atlantic, when they 
were echoed back from the battlements of Gibraltar. 
The spot upon her fame was but a spot upon the 
sun, visible for a moment, and then burning into ten- 
fold glory. 

The final and the heaviest trial was at hand. The 
middle of the eighteenth century had exhibited phe- 
nomena from which the most inexperienced glance 
augured that some extraordinary change was at hand. 
The public mind wore nothing of the old contented 
physiognomy of the fifty years before : the period 



1811. J THE REGENCY. 275 

began with bold doubts and giddy conclusions ; every 
topic that had once been approached with sacred re- 
spect, was treated with increasing familiarity and 
scorn ; skepticism in religion, law, and government 
became the distinction of the popular leaders; po- 
pular opinion was the idol, and its ministers were 
ambition, rashness, passion, and vengeance. 

The treachery of the French government had re- 
coiled upon itself; while it haughtily looked forward 
to the downfall of England, it found France wrapped 
in sudden conflagration. The army, returning from 
America, had brought the fire at the point of their 
swords. The popular impulse was instantly given, 
and it was irresistible. France had always been a 
licentious country, but her vices had been chiefly 
among the opulent and high-born; and as their num- 
bers bore no proportion to the multitude whom the 
necessary labours of life kept pure, the higher turpi- 
tude floated on in its own region, and threw scarcely 
more than the shadow of a passing cloud below. 

But now a fearful change was observed among the 
people : the luxurious and fantastic vice of the no- 
bles was overwhelmed in the rude and fierce crimi- 
nality of the multitude. The sneers of the refined 
infidel, dispensing his polished witticisms in the sa- 
loons of nobles and princes, w5re lost in the roar of 
the furious sons of carnage in the streets. The 
priest, the noble, and the sovereign together paid the 
penalty of neglecting the education of the national 
mind. The storm descended upon them, they felt 
bewildered alike, and blindly cast themselves into 
the hands of their executioners. And this blindness 
and astonishment were not limited to the effeminate 
dependants on the court, or the feeble and indolent 
possessors of the high offices of the church. 

The force of the multitude was an unknown ele- 
ment, a new-created form of evil, that terrified even 
those who had been most instrumental in calling 
it upon the earth. Mirabeau and the leaders of the 



276 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1811. 

national assembly were the first to be startled at 
their own work, and fly in alarm from its uncalcu- 
lated and terrible energies. They had thought that 
they might play on the monarch's weakness in safety, 
by pointing to the volcano at a distance ; they sud- 
denly felt the whole soil volcanic, and blazing up 
under their feet. Like the Italian poison-makers, 
the mask had no sooner dropped off, than they felt 
themselves paralyzed and dying over the fumes of 
their own crucible. There can be no doubt that 
those leaders, some of whom were honest, and many 
able, were utterly unacquainted with the tremendous 
influence which resides in the roused passions of the 
people. With Mirabeau and his immediate faction, 
the whole was selfishness and charlatanism; their 
magic was for its lucre ; and when they brought 
their deluded king, like Saul of old, to kneel in their 
cavern and solicit their oracle, they meditated only 
some new jugglery. But a mightier power was 
there : they saw their fictitious summons answered 
by a terrible reality, a vast and uncircumscribed ap- 
parition rising before them, uttering words over 
which they had no control, and declaring to their 
infatuated king that his day was done, his throne 
rent away, and his blood given to his enemies I 
Then they were overwhelmed with the conscious- 
ness of Avhat they had done ; they sank at the feet 
of their victim, and, with vain remorse, implored his 
forgiveness for their guilt and his ruin. 

If the example of France were not followed in 
this country, and if England, first enduring the hos- 
tility, afterward became the protectress, of Europe, 
a large portion of the merit must be attributed to the 
king's individual character. He stooped to no base- 
ness, personal or political ; he preserved the tone of 
public morals in its highest state ; he observed the 
forms and worshipped the spirit of religion ; he was 
a faithful husband, a fond father, and a patriot 
king. On those qualities he laid the foundations of ^ 



1811.] THE REGENCY. 277 

his throne, and for those we honour him in his 
grave. 

The restrictions on the regency expired in 1812, 
and the party under Lords Grey and Grenville confi- 
dently expected to be recalled to office ; but a clearer 
view would have shown them that they had lost all 
influence on the prince's mind. If the regent's friend- 
ship were to be their dependence, it had nearly passed 
away with the death of Fox ; if similarity of politi- 
cal opinion, — the prince, like other men, had seen the 
rashness of his early conceptions chastised by time, 
and he also must have found it difficult to compre- 
hend a system of political faith compounded of tenets 
so long opposed as those of Lords Grey and Gren- 
ville ; if political wisdom, — the events of every year 
since their dismissal had thrown their predictions 
into condign disgrace. Upon this last point, public 
opinion alone would have compelled the prince to 
reject them. - 

On the first failures of the Spanish war, they had 
become determined prophets of ill. At the com- 
mencement of every campaign, they pronounced that 
it must end in disaster ; and when it ended in victory, 
they pronounced that in disaster the next must be- 
gin. They saw nothing in the most gallant suc- 
cesses but a waste of national blood, an extravagant 
flourish of military vanity, a vulgar gladiatorship. In 
every trivial reverse they discovered inextricable ruin. 
Such are the humiliating necessities of party. It 
cannot afford to be honest. There was, perhaps, 
not an individual in opposition at that time, who, if 
his real sentiments were to be spoKen, wou^d not 
have given the fullest praise to the conduct of the 
peninsular war, have rejoiced in its noble opportunity 
of restoring the brightness of the British arms, and 
have exulted with natural feeling in the true British 
effort to crush a tyrant, and restore a brave people 
to the possession of their soil. But opposition was 

Aa 



278 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1812. 

destined to give a full display of the fetters that 
party rivets upon its slaves. Victory followed vic- 
tory, alike of the highest importance and the most 
unquestionable kind : opposition was still urged by 
its fate, and raised its expiring voice to depreciate 
those successes. The empire was in a tumult of ex- 
ultation at its triumphs : opposition, shrunk into its 
corner, saw nothing but visions of ruin ; and conti- 
nued, pitching its rebel tones at one time to the fu- 
neral song of the comitry, and at another to the Id 
pcean of Napoleon. 

Some of its orators put up their prayers that the 
French marshals would have mercy enough on the 
British anny to let it escape to the seaside ; others 
declared that they should consider a repetition of 
the Closterseven convention, or the surrender at Sa- 
ratoga, a happy alternative for the horrors of a 
French pursuit. One patriot distinguished himself 
by saying, that " for all national purposes, the sol- 
diers might as well be shot in St. James's Park." 
But, if the scale sank which bore the honours of 
England, the glory of the enemy kicked the beam. 
Napoleon was pronounced, not simply the first of 
mortals, but something more than mortal: he was 
termed " the child of providence — the man of des- 
tiny — the unconquerable — the inscrutable," — with 
no unfrequent intimations, that resistance to his will 
might involve the repugnants in impiety as well as 
rashness and folly. Still, the rashness was returned 
by victories, and the impiety left the thunders to 
sleep; the nation persevered in defeating the uncon- 
querable, and detecting the inscrutable, until their 
common sense revolted against the endurance of this 
absurdity ; and opposition was forced to be silent at 
last, and wait for the contingencies that, like the 
Turkish providence, have especial care for the halt, 
the lunatic, and the blind. 

1812. — The administration formed by the king, 
witli Mr. Perceval at its head, had conducted public 



1812.] THE REGENCY. 279 

affairs with such obvious advantage during the year, 
that the nation would have regarded its loss as a ge<- 
neral injury. But the prince, on the commencement 
of the unrestricted regency, influenced by a desire 
to combine the whole legislature in the struggle 
against the common enemy, made an offer of em- 
ployraent to opposition in union with the Perceval 
ministry. His sentiments were expressed in this let- 
ter to the Duke of York. 

" Mv DEAREST Brother,^ — As the restrictions on the 
exercise of the royal authority will shortly expire, 
when I. must make my arrangements for the future 
administration of the powers with which I am in- 
vested, I think it right to communicate those senti- 
ments which I was withheld from expressing, at an 
earlier period of the session, by my warmest desire 
that the expected motion on the affairs of Ireland 
might undergo the deliberate discussion of parliament 
unmixed with any other consideration. 

" I think it hardly necessary to call your recollec- 
tion to the recent circumstances under which I as- 
sumed the authority delegated me by parliament. 
At a moment of unexampled difficulty and danger 
I was called upon to make a selection of persons to 
whom I should intrust the functions of the execu- 
tive government. My sense of duty to our royal fa- 
ther solely decided that choice ; and every private 
feeling gave way to considerations which admitted 
of no doubt or hesitation. 

" I trust I acted in that respect as the genuine re- 
presentative of the august person whose functions I 
was appointed to discharge ; and I have the satisfac- 
lion of knowing, that such was the opinion of per- 
sons for whose judgment and honourable feelings I 
entertain the highest respect. In various instances, 
as you well know, where the law of the last ses- 
sion left me at full liberty, I waived any personal 
gratification in order that his majesty might resume, 



280 GEORGE THE FOrRTH. [1812. 

on his restoration to health, every power and prero- 
gative belonging to the crown. I certainly am the 
last person to whom it can be permitted to despair 
of our royal father's recovery. A new era is now 
arrived, and I cannot but reflect with satisfaction on 
the events which have distinguished the short period 
of my restricted regency. Instead of suffering in 
the loss of her possessions, by the gigantic force 
which has been employed against them, Great Britain 
has added most important acquisitions to her empire. 
The national faith has been preserved inviolable to- 
wards our allies ; and if character is strength, as ap- 
plied to a nation, the increased and increasing repu- 
tation of his majesty's arms will show to the nations 
of the continent, how much they may achieve when 
animated by a glorious spirit of resistance to a fo- 
reign yoke. In the critical situation of the war in 
the peninsula, I shall be most anxious to avoid any 
measure which can lead my allies to suppose that I 
mean to depart from the present system. Perseve- 
rance alone can achieve the great object in question; 
and I cannot withhold my approbation from those 
who have honourably distinguished themselves in 
support of it. I have no predilections to indulge — 
no resentments to gratify — no objects to attain, but 
such as are common to the whole empire. If such 
is the leading principle of my conduct — and I can 
appeal to the past as evidence of what the future will 
be — I flatter myself I shall meet with the support of 
parliament, and of a candid and enlightened nation. 
Having made this communication of my sentiments 
in this new and extraordinary crisis of our affairs, 
I cannot conclude without expressing the gratifica- 
tion I should feel, if some of those persons with 
whom the early habits of my public life were formed, 
would strengthen my hands, and constitute a part 
of my government. With such support, and aided 
by a vigorous and united administration, formed on 
the most liberal basis, I shall look with additional 



1812.] THE REGENCY. 281 

confidence to a prosperous issue of the most arduous 
contest in which Great Britain was ever engaged. 
You are authorized to communicate those sentiments 
to Lord Grey, who, I have no doubt, will make them 
known to Lord Grenville. 

" I am always, my dearest Frederick, 
" Your ever affectionate brother, 
(Signed) "GEORGE P. R." 
" Carlton House, Feb. 13, 1812." 

"P.S.^T shall send a copy of this letter imme- 
diately to Mr. Perceval." 

Mr. Perceval had led the attack which displaced 
the coalition ministry. To join him, and be also 
his subordinates, would have had all the shame of a 
third coalition, without the profit. The proposal was 
declined ; and the nation proceeded, unconscious of 
its loss. In 1811, Portugal had been completely 
cleared of the enemy. In 1812, the great battle of 
Salamanca gave a proof that the British troops 
could be superior to the enemy in tactics as well as 
in valour, — that they were " a manoeuvring army ;" 
Madrid was freed from the usurping king, and the 
French supremacy in Spain approached its end. 

But while Mr. Perceval was thus prosperously 
directing the affairs of the empire, the hand of an 
assassin put an end to his blameless and active life. 
On the evening of the 11th of May, as he was pass- 
ing through the lobby of the house of commons, a 
man, who had previously placed himself in the re- 
cess of the doorway, fired a pistol into his bosom. 
The ball entered his heart ; he uttered but the words, 
" I'm murdered," tottered forwards a few steps, and 
fell into the arms of some persons who had rushed 
to his assistance. He was carried into the room of 
the speaker's secretary, while medical aid was sent 
for. But all was hopeless ; he died within a few 
minutes. The atrocious act was so instantaneous, 
Aa2 



283 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1812. 

that the assassin was not observed for some time ; 
he had retired calmly towards a bencji, and was 
looking- at the scene of confusion when he was 
seized. He made no attempt either to escape or re- 
sist, but merely said, " I am the unhappy man ;" and 
surrendered himself to the members, who, on hear- 
ing the shot, had crowded into the lobby. He was, 
of course, committed to Newgate and broug^ht to 
trial. 

His conduct in this fatal transaction was a melan- 
choly proof of the delusions to which a mind even 
of some intelligence may be exposed by a violent 
temper. He told his story with the simplicity of 
perfect innocence. He was an Eng-lishman, residing 
for some years as a merchant at Archangel. Be- 
coming bankrupt, and conceiving himself aggrieved 
by the Russian govennnent, he had applied to the 
British ambassador for redress ; but he having none 
to give, Bellingham determined to shoot him for 
what he pronounced his negligence. The ambassa- 
dor escaped by being recalled, and Bellingham fol- 
lowed him to London, — to " shoot him there." Still 
this obnoxious officer escaped; and the broken mer- 
chant sent in a succession of memorials to the mi- 
nisters. He was at last informed, that they had no 
means of procuring retribution from the Russian go- 
vernment ; and he " made up his mind to shoot the 
first minister who came in his way." He had spent 
the day walking about London ; and when the hour 
approached at which the business of the house of 
commons usually begins, had stationed himself at the 
lobby door, xvith a case of pistols in his pocket. He 
added, that " having no personal hostility to Mr. Per- 
ceval, he would have preferred shooting the ambas- 
sador ; but that, as the matter turned out, he was 
satisfied that he had only done his duty, and," placing 
his hand on his heart, " his justification Avas there.'''* 
He was forty-two years of age, of a pale, intelligent 
countenance, and with the look of a gentleman. On 



1812.] THE REGENCY. 283 

his trial, an attempt was made by his counsel to prove 
him insane ; but he made no pretence of that nature, 
was found guilty, persisted to the last in asserting 
that he was justified in the murder, and died, frigid 
and fearless, a reasoning madman. 

The prince regent, who was deeply shocked by the 
death of the minister, expressed his sense of the mis- 
fortune, by sending down a message to the house the 
day after, condoling with them on the general loss, 
and proposing an annuity for Mrs. Perceval and her 
children. The house voted four thousand pounds 
a-year for the widow's life, with the evident intention 
of her applying this munificent provision to the sup- 
port of her children. But the grant would have been 
more wisely worded if it had been limited to her 
widowhood ; for, to the surprise of the country, the 
lady, thus amply dowered, solaced herself without 
loss of time in a second marriage, and gave a lesson 
to the house for their future dealings with the wearers 
of weeds. 

The premiership had now returned to the hands 
of the regent ; and the Marquis Wellesley was com- 
missioned to form an administration. Lords Grey 
and Grenville, as the heads of the whigs, were ap- 
plied to ; but the old fate of the party clung to them 
still. No combination of grave men ever possessed 
in such perfection the art of turning all their measures 
into the shape of absurdity. They loudly declared 
that a whig administration was essential to the 
country, and then declared that no whig administra- 
tion should be formed unless they had possession 
of the whole royal patronage. The regent wished 
to retain the officers of the household : the whigs pro- 
tested that they would not stir hand nor foot, unless 
their terras for" saving their country" were instantly 
granted, and the household given as the first depo- 
site. Without wandering through the whole laby- 
rinth of an intrigue at once ridiculous and contempt- 
ible, it is enough to say, that the cabal met their 



284 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1812. 

usual destiny. They were defeated, sent back igno- 
miniously to the opposition benches, and left to 
meditate on the wisdom of asking too much, and 
losing- all. 

What was to be thought of the patriotism of men 
who, on their own showing, would postpone the pre- 
servation of the empire to the low cupidity or child- 
ish vanity of making chamberlains and vice-cham- 
berlains, — those titled valets and embroidered me- 
nials, obsolete fragments of the obsolete times of 
parade, that encumber courts, and equally fatigue the 
eye of king and people ] Their phrase of " riding 
rough-shod through Carlton House," too, had not been 
lost upon the regent, and he must have shrunk from 
such grasping claimants for the price of rescuing 
empires from ruin. But their defeat was directly 
the work of Sheridan. In all the misfortunes of that 
extraordinary man, there still survived some of that 
warm-heartedness which had early distinguished him 
from his party. His inevitable consciousness of his 
own great talents made him look with scorn on the 
sullen hauteur, and cold and frowning severity round 
him, — those intrenchments which pretension thrown 
up against the approach of real ability. His con- 
nexion with Fox was one of personal fondness, and 
natural admiration ; but with the death of that emi- 
nent individual, whose amenity of manners could 
alone popularize the whig peerage, Sheridan's attach- 
ment perished ; and he thenceforth suffered himself 
less to be led than dragged along by the obligations 
of party. The volunteer spirit was gone, and if he 
appeared on the muster, or went into the field, it was 
simply to avoid the stigma of desertion. 

He had long been personally attached to the prmce, 
to whom he observes, in a correspondence on the 
changes of ministry, " Junius said, in a public letter 
of his addressed to your royal father, ' the fate which 
made you a king forbade your having a friend.' I 
deny his proposition as a general maxim. I am 



1812.] THE REGENCY. 285 

confident that your royal highness possesses quali- 
ties to win and secure to you the attachment and de- 
votion of private friendship, in spite of your being a 
sovereign."* He felt for the situation in which the 
regent must find himself, with masters, who had 
exhibited such a disposition to have all, even before 
they could call themselves servants. On a similar 
attempt, the year before, he had let loose the following 
lines, in imitation of Rochester's to Charles ; — 

ADDRESS TO THE PRINCE. 

In all humility we crave, 
Our Regent may become our slave; 
And being so, we trust that he 
Will thank us for our loyalty. 
Then, if he'll help us to pull down 
His father's dignity and crown, 
We'll make him, in so?ne time to come, 
The greatest prince in CliristendonTi. 

The demand of the household was so obviousTyln" 
the spirit of political extortion, that all the prince's 
immediate friends were indignant against it. " You 
shall never part with one of them," was the chivalric 
declaration of the Marquis of Hastings. Sheridan 
took an equally characteristic way, and which, by 
its very form, he clearly intended to cover the whole 
transaction with ridicule. The household, as a mat- 
ter of etiquette, had offered their resignations ; and 
Sheridan, armed with this intelligence, went out to 
take his daily walk in St. James's-street. Some ru- 
mour of it had transpired, and Mr. Tierney, then 
high in the whig councils, stopped him, and asked 
whether the news were true. "What will you 
bet that it is ?" said Sheridan, " for / will bet any 
man five hundred guineas that it is noV The con- 
versation was carried without delay to the party. 
The hook was completely swallowed. The treaty 

* Moore 



286 GEORGE THE FOURTH, [1820 

was broken off, and when the eyes of those noble 
persons were at last opened, they found that they 
had been repulsed by an imaginary obstacle, and out- 
witted by a wager, and even a fictitious wager ! 

Their next intelligence was of a more solid kind. 
The Earl of Liverpool stated in the house of lords 
that the prince regent had appointed him first lord 
of the treasury.* 



CHAPTER XVI. 

The British Empire. 



After ten years of solitude and mental privation, 
the good king, George the Third, was called from 
the world.f His last hours were without pain, and, 
fortunately, without a return of that understanding 
which could have shown him only the long state of 
suffering in which he had lain. His death excited 
universal sympathy, and the day on which his ho- 
noured remains were committed to the grave, was 
observed with unfeigned reverence and sorrow 
throughout his empire. 

The prince regent was now summoned to his in- 
heritance, and George the Fourth was enthroned 
king of England, the noblest dominion that the sun 
looks upon ! 

The immense magnitude of the Roman empire 
might well have justified the Roman pride. It co- 
vered a million and a half of square miles of the finest 
portion of the globe. Stretching three thousand 
miles, from the Atlantic to the Euphrates ; and two 
thousand miles, from the northern borders of Dacia 
to the tropic of Cancer ; it was the seat of all the 

*8thof June, 1812. 1 29th January, 1820 



1820.J THE BRITISH EMPIRE. 287 

choicest fertility, beauty and wealth, of the world. 
Imagination sinks under the idea of this prodigious 
power in the hands of a single nation, and that na- 
tion in the hands of a single man. 

It might be difficult, on human grounds, to discover 
the ultimate causes of this mighty donative of supre- 
macy to an Italian peninsula. But in the govern- 
ment of the Great Disposer of events nothing is done 
without a reason, and that the wisest reason. The 
reduction of so vast a portion of the earth under 
one sceptre was among the providential means of 
extending Christianity. The easier intercourse, the 
similarity of law, the more complete security of life 
and property, the general pacification of nations, 
which, under separate authority, would have filled 
the earth with blood, — all the results of melting 
down the scattered diadems of Europe and Asia into 
one, — palpably corresponded with the purpose of pro- 
pagating the last and greatest revelation. 

This purpose of the Roman empire accounts for 
its sudden breaking up, and the absence of all proba- 
bility that it 'will ever have a successor. When 
Christianity was once firmly fixed, the use of this 
superb accumulation of power was at an end. None 
like itself shall follow it, because its use cannot re 
turn. Society has been, for the wisest purposes, re- 
duced into fragments ; and the peaceful rivalry of 
nations in arts and civilization is to accomplish that 
illustrious progress, which, under the pressure of a 
vast, uniform dominion, must have been looked for 
in vain. 

But another paramount dominion was yet to be 
created, of a totally different nature ; less compact, 
yet not less permanent; less directly wearing the 
shape of authority, yet perhaps still more irresistible ; 
and in extent throwing the power of Rome out of 
all comparison — the British empire. Its sceptre is 
Influence. — The old policy brought force into the 
field against force ; it tore down the opposing king 



888 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1820. 

doms by main strength ; it chained to the ground the 
neck of the barbarian, whom it had first discomfited 
by the sword. This was the rude discipline of 
times, when the sternness of savage human nature 
was to be tamed only by the dexterous and resolute 
sternness of civilization. But a nobler and more 
softened state of our being has followed, and for it a 
more lofty and humane discipline has been provi- 
dentially given. 

England is now the actual governor of the earth ; 
if true dominion is to be found in being the common 
source of appeal in all the injuries and conflicts of 
rival nations, the common succour against the ca- 
lamities of nature, the great ally which every power 
threatened with war labours first to secure or to ap- 
pease, the centre on which is suspended the peace 
of nations, the defender of the wronged, and, highest 
praise of all, the acknowledged origin and example 
to which every rising nation looks for laws and con- 
stitution ! For whose opulence and enjoyment are 
the ends of the earth labouring at this hour 1 For 
whom does the Polish peasant run his plough through 
the ground ? For whom does the American, with 
half a world between, hunt down his cattle, or plant 
his cotton ? For whom does the Chinese gather in 
his teas, or the Brazilian his gold and precious 
stones ? England is before the eyes of all. To 
whose market does every merchant of the remotest 
corners of the world look 1 To whose cabinet does 
every power, from America to India, turn with an 
interest surpassing all other 1 Whose public feeling 
does every people, struggling to raise itself in the 
rank of nations, supplicate ? The answer is sug- 
gested at once, — England's. At this hour, a British 
cannon fired would be the signal for plunging every 
kingdom of Europe into war. 

This sovereignty contains all the essentials of the 
old dominion without its evils. It is empire, without 
the charges, the hazards, the profligacy, and the 



1820.] THE BRITISH EMPIRE. 289 

tyranny of empire. Nothing but despotism could 
have kept together the mass of the Roman state. 
The nature of its parts was repulsion, and the com- 
mon band a chain of iron. The supremacy of Eng- 
land is of a more elevated kind, the supremacy of a 
magnificent central luminary, round vt^hich all the 
rest revolve, urged by impulses suitable to their 
various frames, and following their common course 
with a feeling that it is the course of nature. 

If we glance at British India, we shall find it the 
most important foreign possession ever ruled by an 
European power. The Spanish colonies in South 
America were more extensive, but they were, in a 
boundless proportion, wilderness — ^regions of forest, 
swamp, and sand. In the peninsula of Hindostan, 
England governs an immense realm of extraordinary 
fertility ; for the chief part, crowded with popula- 
tion, and the ancient seat of wealth to the world. 
By a gradual progress of combined policy and 
conquest, she has advanced from a factory to an 
empire. 

Of all revolutions of power, this was the happiest 
for India. No country of earth had been, from the 
earliest periods of authentic history, so habitually 
the object of invasion and plunder. Its wealth, its 
diversity of government, and the harmless and un- 
warlike habits of its people, at once excited the cupi- 
dity and encouraged the violence of all the barbarian 
tribes of Asia. From the days of Alexander India 
was overflowed by the resistless depredations of Tar- 
tar and Turcoman, on east, north, and west ; the early 
Persian, the Saracens under Mahomet's generals and 
successors, the Mogul under Zingis and Tamerlane, 
the Persian again under Nadir Shah. While the 
Western empire was sinking under the perpetual 
influx of the Scythian tribes, the same scene was 
going on in the East; but with the distinction that 
the Italian invader became a settler on the soil, and, 
gradually, a bulwark against invasion. The Indian 

Bb 



290 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1820. 

invader came like the locust, and went like the 
locust, to return at the moment when the first veg'e- 
tation sprang- out of the withered and cankered soil. 
The dynasties too that rose in India from the blood 
of the Mahometan conquerors, inherited the savage 
and predatory spirit of their race, and every throne 
was exposed to perpetual violence. Into the midst 
of this chaos the power of England came like a 
mighty minister of good ; her system of mediation 
assuaged the wrath of barbarians, who till then 
had never thought of delaying their vengeance ; and 
the fear of the irresistible English arms coerced the 
furious, and protected the peaceable, even where an 
English soldier had never planted his foot. But the 
territory in actual possession of the English was 
proverbial for its tranquillity. The land which had 
seen an invader every dozen years, and been turned 
into a howling wilderness by those most merciless of 
all inflictions, has never seen a hostile face since the 
days of Hyder Ali. 

Cavils are easily made against all things human. 
There must be weaknesses and deficiencies in all 
great establishments ; but it would be ungenerous and 
untrue to deny, that the principles of our govern- 
ment in the East are conformable to the manliness, 
benevolence, and integrity of the British character. 
Our labours have been directed to the security of 
property, to the inculcation of honesty and generous 
feeling in the public functionaries, to the sanctity of 
moral obligation, and to the introduction of a purer 
judicial code. Those are the highest benefits that 
nation can confer on nation. And, for those, what 
do we receive in return 1 — power, undoubtedly, but 
wealth none. The Indian treasury scarcely pays the 
various expenditures of its administration. Unlike 
the other masters of that noble country, we extract 
npthing from the miseries of the people. Our reve- 
nues are refunded to the soil from which they are 
drawn. The only income of the India Company 



1820.] THE BRITISH EMPIRE. 291 

arises from commerce, and the only productive com- 
merce is with China. 

But the expiration of the Company's charter will 
give a new existence to our intercourse. The strange 
and discordant principles which must belong to a 
government mixed of civil and commercial control, 
with a litigated sceptre, one half in the hands of 
ministers, and the other half in the hands of a mer- 
cantile committee, will be extinguished, and the In- 
dian peninsula enjoy the full benefits of her fertility 
and her situation, unencumbered by the restraints of 
an essentially jealous monopoly. Already an ex- 
tension of her trade to the various ports of England 
has been attended with opulent returns. Industry' 
has been excited in India, and enterprise in England : 
when both shall be ripe for the total freedom of com- 
merce, the benefits to both maybe beyond calculation. 

A great eastern region has been, within these few 
years, opened to us. The archipelago that spreads 
almost from Ceylon to Japan, the most various, fer- 
tile, and lovely zone of islands on the face of the 
globe, the native country of all the richest products, 
the sugar-cane, and the spices, is now traversed by 
our vigorous adventure. The brilliant experiment 
of a free trade has been made among those islands, 
and its effect has been to create a most prosperous 
and powerful settlement in seas hitherto swept by 
pirates. British capital is rapidly flowing to this 
fortunate spot ; the trade of China and India is rush- 
ing down to it in increasing streams ; and its found- 
ers may yet be reckoned among the founders of some 
vast and benevolent empire, some magnificent east- 
ern Carthage, without its criminal ambition, and 
safe from its fall ; a noble imbodying of that com- 
mercial liberality and public honour which Eng- 
land alone could offer to eastern eyes, and which 
is at once the sign of her strength, and the security 
of her dominion. 

Even in Africa, later years have made some casual 



292 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1820 

advances, which maybe strengthened into substantial 
progress. Our settlements at its southern promon- 
tory are still feeble, and struggling with unexpected 
and difficult anomalies of climate ; droughts of three 
years that burn up all cultivation, foUow^ed by torrents 
of a single lu^lrd that sweep away the harvest and 
the cultivator. But where English industry has 
once planted its step, it has seldom receded. The 
extravagant hopes of the first settlers have, by this 
time, been subdued into a fair estimate of their 
situation. They have fixed their standard, and it 
will never be plucked up. Larger examination of 
the country has found out districts more susceptible 
of secure cultivation; and we shall, before many 
years are passed, hear no more of Hottentot inva- 
sions, the ravages of wild beasts, or the stubbornness 
of the seasons. To those will succeed the vigorous 
fruits of English society, wise laws, active experi- 
ments on the capabilities of the country, commercial 
efforts, and the use of those admirable inventions by 
which the powers of nature are made the servants 
of man. They have already in the settlements at 
the Cape, the mail-coach, the steam-engine, and the 
gas-light ; — ten years ago, they had the naked barba- 
rian, the lion, and the wilderness. 

On the western side, too, of this sullen continent 
our late discoveries give some hope of secure and 
productive knowledge. Denhain and Clapperton 
have made their country acquainted with the cen- 
tral region of Africa. They have found it compa- 
ratively temperate, though under the line ; compa- 
ratively civilized, though scarcely knowing the name 
of Europe ; and fertile to an extraordinary degree. 
To gain a commercial route to this country is now 
the most interesting problem : a part of its territory 
reaches to within a fortnight's journey of the coast of 
Benin. The great rivers run towards the Gulf 
of Benin; and it is presumed that the Niger, so long 
a subject of eager inquiry in its source, its direction, 



1820.] THE BRITISH EMPIRE. 293 

and its mouth, empties itself into this g"ulf. If a na- 
vigation into the interior can be found, important re- 
sults may be looked for. Commercial advantages 
must be among the more immediate consequences ; 
and the land of gold and ivory, gums, and perhaps 
of other valuable products, must be thrown open to 
England. But higher objects of general utility and 
honourable benevolence may be in reserve. The dif- 
fusion of the arts and knowledge of Europe among 
a people not yet perverted by the atrocities of the 
slave-trade, a better system of morality, the spirit 
of law, and of Christianity, would be the gifts of 
British intercourse : a vast multitude of the human 
race would be elevated in their rank as social be- 
ings. The steam-navigation, which seems to have 
been almost especially designed for the use of 
penetrating the great solid continents, would leave 
no recess of the whole region of central Africa 
unexplored. 

Passing down to the east and soutli of the Indian 
isles, we come to a fifth continent, New-Holland, 
stretching nearly thirty degrees from north to south, 
and nearly thirty-five from east to west ! Here dis- 
covery has yet advanced only far enough to know 
that its interior contains but a few half-naked sa- 
vages, and that an immense portion of its soil is 
friendly to European produce. The British settle- 
ments on its eastern coast have already assumed a 
vigour and stability which place them beyond the 
hazards of early colonization : pasturage and agri- 
culture, the natural pursuits of young states, are 
giving them opulence ; a moral population is rapidly 
superseding, or civilizing, the original settlers ; Eng- 
lish habits and laws are firmly planted in this bound- 
less region ; and a dominion is rising there which 
may be destined, at no long interval, to become the 
powerful and fortunate means of liberating the whole 
splendid chain of the Indian isles from the supersti- 
Bb2 



294 GEORGE fHE FOURTH. [1820. 

tions, miseries, and tyrannies that have for so many 
ages defeated the unparalleled bounty of nature. 

An extraordinary phenomenon presented in the 
southern ocean may render our settlements in New- 
South Wales of still more eminent importance. A 
SIXTH CONTINENT is in the very act of growing up be- 
fore our eyes ! The Pacific is spotted with islands 
through the immense space of nearly fifty degrees 
of longitude, and as many of latitude. Each of 
these islands seems to be merely a central spot for 
the formation of coral banks, which, by a perpetual 
progress, are rising from the depths of the sea. The 
union of a few of those masses of rock shapes itself 
into a solid circle, the seeds of plants are carried to 
it by birds or by the waves, and from the moment 
that it overtops the waters, it is covered with vege- 
tation. The new island constitutes in its turn a 
centre of growth to another circle. The great 
powers of nature are in peculiar activity in this re- 
gion; and to her tardier processes she often calls the 
assistance of the volcano and the earthquake. From 
the south of New-Zealand to the north of the Sand- 
wich Islands, the waters absolutely teem with those 
future seats of civilization. The coral insect, the 
diminutive builder of all those mighty piles, is un- 
ceasingly at work: the ocean is intersected wath 
myriads of its lines of foundation ; and when the 
rocky substructure shall have finally excluded the 
sea, then will come the dominion of man. 

Passing round the southern cape of America to 
the western Atlantic, we again find the British empire, 
the chain of the West Indian islands, covering the 
whole shore of Mexico ; the noblest breakwater in 
the world, stretching through nearly twenty degrees 
of latitude, and sixteen of longitude. The fertility, 
peculiar productions, and commercial value of those 
islands are matters of common knowledge. But 
they have lately acquired a still higher value, as 
means of power. Until the year 1782 the whole 



1820.] THE BRITISH EMPIRE. 296 

range of the islands had been contemplated in 
scarcely a more elevated point of view than as sup- 
;dying the Eng-lish markets with sugar and coffee. 
To their west lay a vast and obscure world, known 
only as the residence of Spanish prid,3 and tyranny, 
and of an unhappy and decaying native population, — 
a boundless extent of forest and fen, of ignorance 
and savage life, productive for no purpose of good 
to the great family of nations. 

To their north lay British America, more known, 
more vigorously forced into the service of human 
nature, more abundant in prospects of national gran- 
deur and social virtue; yet still a series of lonely 
colonies, struggling with the difficulties of situation, 
with novelty of climate, with individual poverty, and 
the general countless disabilities of men torn pain- 
fully from an old and highly civilized country. 

The American war forced those colonies into new 
activity. The spirit and manliness which might 
have been worn out in the silent and unexciting war- 
fare with the swamp and the forest, were suddenly 
turned to the most stirring of all human purposes, 
war for popular objects. The struggle awoke the 
United States to an instantaneous and lasting dis- 
play of national energy. No pacific connexion with 
England could have placed them so suddenly in the 
rank of leading powers. War seems to be the me- 
lancholy price that every nation must pay for emi- 
nence. And the martial attitude of republican Ame- 
rica not less drew upon her the eyes of Europe, 
with an niterest that would not have been vouch- 
safed, though her shoulders were stooping under the 
quiet wealth of the western hemisphere. But Ame- 
rica at war with England raised the West Indies 
into direct importance. They offered the harbours, 
the magazines, and the citadels, from which the wrath 
of Britain was to be hurled against the rebellious 
continent. • 

From this period must be dated the commence- 



296 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1820. 

ment of that noble national indignation, which waa 
determined to extinguish the British slave-trade. 
The more frequent intercourse of our military 
ofRcers and public functionaries with the islands, 
brought abuses and crimes to light to which no 
public indignation had been turned, merely because 
there was no public knowledge. The Englishman, 
proceeding directly from his free country into the 
centre of the slave-community, was struck with 
horror at scenes, which, to the habitual avarice of 
the merchant, or the habitual tyranny of the planter, 
were unmarked and natural. The general sensibility 
was now awakened, and from that hour the abolition 
of the slave-trade was virtually decreed. The Bri- 
tish parliament gave the first deadly blow to this 
guilty traffic, and England was disburdened of a 
weight of crime. 

Since that period the keys of a still more splendid 
influence have been given to the West Indian islands. 
The French Revolution, that strove in vain to break 
up the power of Spain in Europe, utterly destroyed 
it in the New World. In this desperate war, which 
tasked all the powers of the mother country, she had 
no strength to retain the colonies. The storm was 
too strong on the royal ship of Spain to leave her at 
liberty to keep her dependencies in her wake. She 
was forced to cast them adrift ; and, once left to take 
their own free course, no human power could hope 
to bring them back to their old connexion. 

After a war of eleven years, Mexico and the north- 
ern provinces of South America were recompensed 
for their sacrifices by freedom. Those years were 
marked by strange, and sometimes bloody, reverses. 
The Spanish officers, released from the perpetual 
and perplexing supervision of their own court, often 
exhibited the qualities that once made Spain the 
model of European warfare. Signal instances of 
intrepidity, sagacicius generalship, gallant enterprise, 
and, above all, patience of hardship and privation, 



1820.] THE BRITISH EMPIRE. 297 

were to be found among the royal armies. But they 
were encountered, if by inferior military knowledge, 
by equal intrepidity, and by the spirit of independ- 
ence, itself equivalent to victory. Those fine pro- 
vinces are still perplexed with dissensions ; but they 
have broken their bonds for ever. 

It is a striking and most important feature in the 
intercourse of this invaluable portion of the New 
World with England, that it promises to be wholly 
peaceful. There is no probable ground for war ; no 
intermediate territory to which both can cast a jea- 
lous eye, no ancient bickering, no rivalry of trade. 
The obvious interest of the republics is peace, and 
peace with England above all other nations. They 
have been led forward by her powerful hand from the 
first moment ; they have been recognised in Europe 
first by her, they have been sustained by her finance, 
they are clothed and furnished by her manufactures. 
They are now rapidly filling with the enterprise and 
productive vigour of the English mind. In a few 
generations, unless some most disastrous and most 
unexpected event should cloud those fortunate pros- 
pects, they will be but England on a larger scale. 

But the West Indies are at once the warehouses 
from which this opulent connexion will be supplied 
along the whole coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and 
the fortresses by which it will be defended. 

The prospects of England in this quarter are not 
yet exhausted. A still more superb vision awaits 
her commercial grandeur. In a few years the Isth- 
mus of Darien will be an isthmus no more, but the 
gate of the highway of all nations. The whole 
coast of Japan and its archipelago, hitherto so 
fiercely prohibited to European activity ; the jealous 
frontier of China ; the semi-barbarous, yet opulent, 
states bordering the seas from Formosa to Malaya ; 
will be inevitably thrown open. No political restraint 
can guard the immense shore of eastern and southern 
Asia, when once the passage shall be open through 



298 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1820. 

Mexico. All the forces of all the sovereignties of 
the East could not repel the perpetual and powerful 
allurements that will be offered to the people by an 
unrestrained interchange of their produce for the 
manufactures and luxuries with which commerce 
comes full-handed. 

The present voyage from the Thames to China 
generally occupies five months. The ship's course, 
in that time, from the variety of winds and other 
causes, is seldom less than from fifteen to twenty 
thousand miles. The outfit for this immense voyage, 
the hazards of the course through difficult seas, and 
the natural slowness of the returns, have hitherto re- 
stricted the commerce of European nations with the 
eastern and southern coasts of Asia, more than all 
the follies and tyrannies of its governments. 

But, by the opening of the isthmus, the whole voy- 
age will be made almost on a parallel, and with almost 
a single wind. This great sea-gate once passed, 
before the navigator lies an immense expanse of 
ocean, that well deserves its name ; the Pacific 
is of all seas the most unruffled. A brief period 
of storm comes at its regular season, as if merely 
to clear away the impurities of this quiet world of 
waters and its tepid atmosphere. Thenceforth all is 
calm for months together. The central zone of the 
Pacific is swept by the trade wind. All to the north 
and south is the true region for the steamboat ; that 
unequalled invention, by which a new power is given 
to science over nature, and man is made lord of the 
wind and the tide, the storm and the calm. 

But England, sharing with all other nations in the 
advantages of this new and incalculable increase of 
the riches of the world, — or rather, taking the lead in 
this great path of opulent discovery, as she had done 
in all otlieis, — must derive from the West Indian 
islands an influence altogether independent of her 
commercial enterprise. They intercept the whole 
Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean Sea. The gate 



1820.'! THE BRITISH EMPIRE. 299 

may be in the hands of Mexico, but the road to it is 
in the hands of England. She could shut it up at a 
moment. Not a sail from Europe could pass, if she 
prohibited it from her West Indian throne. 

Contingencies like those are deeply to be depre- 
cated. No man friendly to human nature, or to the 
supremacy of England, which is identified with the 
freedom, happiness, and security of human nature, 
can desire to see the world again thrown into a state 
of hostility. But if this reluctant necessity should 
arise, here stands the citadel, from which the mis- 
tress of the seas can shake both hemispheres ! 

Turning to the north of this continent, the founda- 
tions of a new empire are seen in Canada. This 
region is, for all actual purposes, boundless ; stretch- 
ing as it does from Nova Scotia, in forty-four degrees 
north latitude, to the Pole ; and from Newfoundland 
to the Pacific, through eighty degrees of longitude. 
If it be objected, that the Canadas are still a wilder- 
ness, and visited with intense cold; it is justly 
answered, that their whole extent is capable of sus- 
taining life, as is shown by the residence of the 
Indian tribes, and the hunters of the Hudson's Bay 
and North-west companies ; that the most populous 
portion of Russia is twenty degrees to the north of 
the American border of Upper Canada ; that Mont- 
, real lies in nearly the same parallel which cuts 
through the south of France, the Adriatic, and the 
Black Sea! And, above all, that the colonists 
crowding to that country are Englishmen, — a race 
proverbially successful in all the tasks to be achieved 
by patient vigour and fearless adventure. Those 
men require only room ; their native energies will 
do the rest. The forest will be cleared, the morass 
drained, the prairie will be a corn-field, the sandy hill 
will bear the vine ; the huge lakes, those Mediterra- 
neans of the New World, will be covered with the 
products of the mineral and agricultural wealth of 
the country ; coal has been already discovered in 



300 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1820. 

great abundance ; iron and the various metals are 
already worked ; the hills abound in every kind of 
limestone, up to the purest marble. The climate is 
singularly healthy. The higher latitude repels all 
the summer epidemics that ravage the United States. 
Even in the severity of its winter, all that is injurious 
will yield to the thinning of the forests, the drainage 
of the swamps, and the other labours of the accu- 
mulating population. The temperature of the Eu- 
ropean climates has gradually given way to the same 
means. The north of France, at the time of the 
Koman conquest, was incapable of rearing the vine. 
The north of Germany was the habitual seat of win- 
ter. Its frosts and damps, more than the sword of 
Arminius, repelled the Roman soldier, seasoned as 
he was, beyond all other men, to all vicissitudes of 
climate. 

But whatever may be the dreams of England's su- 
premacy in this quarter of the globe, in one thing 
she cannot be a dreamer, — in the lofty and cheering 
consciousness that she has laid the foundation of a 
great society, where all before was a wilderness. 
Whether the Canadas shall retain their allegiance, or 
shake it off, there will, at least, be human beings 
where once was solitude ; law, where once was the 
license of savage life; religion, where the Indian 
once worshipped in brutish ignorance ; and England's . 
will be the wand that struck the waters from the rock, 
and filled the desert with fertility and rejoicing. 

It beconies an interesting question, whether this 
smgular prosperity does not contain within itself the 
seeds of decline ? But we have a right to distrust 
those prophets of evil who exert their sagacity only 
in seeing the seeds of ruin in the most palmy state 
of national fortujie. If all the leading commercial 
powers have fallen, England has been placed in a 
condition distinct from them all. AH those states 
were exclusively commercial: they had no foundation 
in the land. Tyre, Carthage, Venice, Genoa, Hal- 



1820.] THE BRITISH EMPIRE. 301 

land, had no territory extensive enough to give them 
a national existence independently of the sea : they 
were strips of territory, inhabited by men whose 
natural dwelling was on shipboard ; they had no po- 
pulation that could meet the attack of the military 
powers that pressed on them by land ; their whole 
armour was in front, their backs were naked. All 
the maritime states were thus compelled to the 
perilous expedient of employing foreign mercenaries. 
The m&rcantile jealousy that uniformly refused the 
rights of citizenship to the neighbouring states, left 
the merchant helpless in his day of danger. The 
French cavalry insulted the gates of Amsterdam at 
pleasure ; the Austrians seized Genoa, and besieged 
Venice, when an Austrian cockboat dared not appear 
on the Adriatic. In older times, the mountaineers of 
Macedon tore down the battlements of the Phoenician 
cities, when their ships were masters of all from 
Syria to the Pillars of Hercules. Scipio found but 
a solitary force of mercenaries between the shore 
and the walls of Carthage. 

From the catastrophe of those small, jealous, and 
tyrannical states, what argument can be drawn to 
the fate of the extensive, the generous, the enlight- 
ened, and, above all, the free ! 

The population of the British Isles is worthy of a 
great dominion. It probably amounts to twenty mil- 
lions ; and that immense number placed under such 
fortunate circumstances of rapid communication and 
easy concentration, as to be equal to twice the 
amount in any other kingdom. Facility of inter- 
course is one of the first principles of civilized 
strength. The rapid returns of merchandise are not 
more indicative of prosperous commerce, than the ra- 
pid intercourse of human kind is essential to national 
civilization and safety. In England, for whatever 
purpose united strength can be demanded, it is for- 
warded to the spot at once. It makes the whole land 
a fortress. If England were threatened with invasion, 
Oc 



302 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1820. 

a hundred thousand men could be conveyed to the 
defence of any point of her coasts within four-and- 
twenty hours ! 

Some common yet striking calculations evince the 
singular facility and frequency of this intercourse. 
The mail-coaches of England run over twelve thou- 
sand miles in a single night — half the circumference 
of the globe ! A newspaper published in the morn- 
ing in London, is, on the same day, read a hundred 
and twenty miles off! The traveller, going at 
night from London, sleeps, on the third night, at a 
distance of more than four hundred miles. The 
length of canal navigation in the vicinage of London 
is computed as equal to the whole canal navigation 
of France ! 

The late combination of the railroad and steam- 
engine systems, and the almost miraculous rapidity 
of passage thus attained, will increase this inter- 
course in an incalculable degree. Ten years more 
of peace may cover England with railroads ; reliev- 
ing the country of the expenses of canals, highways, 
and all the present ponderous and wasteful modes of 
conveyance ; bringing the extremities of the land to- 
gether, by shortening the time of the journey from 
days to hours; and by the nature of the system, 
which offers the most powerful stimulant to the na- 
tive ingenuity of the English mind, and summons the 
artificer from the rude construction of the boat and 
the wagon, to the finest science of mechanism; 
providing, in all probability, for a succession of in- 
ventions, to which even the steam-engine may be 
but a toy. The secret of directing the balloon will 
yet be discovered : and England, adding to her do- 
minion of the land and the sea the mightier mastery 
of the air, will despise the barriers of mountain, 
desert, and ocean. 

But the most important distinction between the 
material of British strength and that of the old com- 
mercial republics, is in the diversity of the popula- 



1820.] THE BRITISH EMPIRE. 303 

tion. The land is not all a dock-yard, nor a manu- 
factory, nor a barrack, nor a ploughed field ; the na- 
tional ship has a sail for every breeze. With a 
. manufacturing- population of three millions, we have 
a professional population, a naval population, and a 
most powerful, healthy, and superabundant agricul- 
tural population, which supplies the drain of them 
all. Of this last and most indispensable class, the 
famous commercial republics were wholly destitute, 
and they therefore fell ; — while England has been an 
mdependent and ruling kingdom since 1066, a period 
already longer than the duration of the Roman em- 
pire from Caesar, and equal to its whole duration 
from the consulate. 

But if the population of our settlements be taken 
into account, the king of England, at this hour, com- 
mands a more numerous people than that of any 
other sceptre on the globe ; excepting the probably 
exaggerated, and the certainly ineffective, multitudes 
of China. He is monarch over one hundred millions 
of men ! With him the old Spanish boast is true : 
"On his dominions the sun never sets." But the 
most illustrious attribute of this unexampled empire 
IS, that its principle is benevolence ! that knowledge 
goes forth with it, that tyranny sinks before it, that 
in its magnificent progress it abates the calamities 
of nature, that it plants the desert, that it civilizes 
the savage, that it strikes off th b fetters of the slave, 
that its spirit is at once " glory to God, and good- 
will to man. " 



304 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1821. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

Queen Caroline. 

No rank can expect to be free from the common 
visitations of life ; and George the Fourth, always 
much attached to his relatives, had suffered, within 
a few years, the loss of his royal mother ;* of his 
brother, the Duke of Kent,f but a week before the 
death of his father ; and of his daughter, the Princess 
Charlotte -jj — afll regretted by the nation; but the loss 
of the last creating an unexampled sorrow. 

The Princess Charlotte, with a spirit of independ- 
ence unusual in her rank, making her own choice, 
and marrying Prince Leopold of Saxe-Cobourg, had 
increased the popular affection for the heiress of the 
throne, by the remarkable propriety and domestic na- 
ture of her life during the year of her marriage. But 
her constitution was feeble ; and when she was about 
to become a mother, it seems to have been unable to re- 
sist that perilous time. She gave birth to a still-bom 
child, and, in a few hours after, unhappily sank into a 
state of exhaustion, and died. The nation received 
the unexpected and painful intelligence as if every 
family had lost a daughter and an heir. Before the 
customary orders for mourning and the other marks 
of public respect could be issued, all England exlii- 
bited the deepest signs of spontaneous homage and 
sorrow. All public places were voluntarily closed ; 
all entertainments laid aside ; the churches hung 
with black by the people, and funeral sermons 
preached every where at their request : the streets 

* 17th Nov. 1818. t 23d Jan. 1820. J 6th Nov. 1817 



1821.] QUEEN CAROLINE. 30S 

deserted; marriages suspended; journeys put oif; 
the whole system of society stopped, as if it had re- 
ceived an irreparable blow. The English residents 
abroad all put on mourning ; and as the intelligence 
passed through the world, every spot where an Eng- 
lishman was to be found, witnessed the same evi- 
dence of the sincerest national sorrow. 

If such were the loss to the people, what must it 
have been to him, who added his feelings as a father 
to those for the broken hope of his line ; and lament- 
ing over an innocent and fond being, dead in the 
most exulting moment of a woman's and a wife's ex- 
istence, saw before him the death-bed of two royal 
generations ! 

But he had scarcely ascended the throne when 
perplexities, if of a less painful kind, of a more ha- 
rassing one, awaited him. The Princess Caroline, 
his consort, who had long resided in Italy, announced 
her determination of returning to England, and de- 
manding the appointments and rank of queen. Her 
life abroad had given rise to the grossest imputations ; 
and her presiding at the court of England, while 
those imputations continued, would have been into- 
lerable. But the means adopted to abate the offence 
argued a singular ignorance of human nature. If 
we must not subscribe to the poetic extravaganza, 
that 

" Hell has no fury like a woman scorned," 

it ought to have been remembered, that woman, 
once thoroughly irritated, sets no bounds to her ven- 
geance. The ^^furens quid fcsmina possit,''^ is as old 
as human nature : yet this violent woman had been 
insulted by the conduct of every English function- 
ary abroad. The announcement of her approach to 
a city where an English ambassador resided, in- 
stantly threw his entire microcosm into a state of 
chaos : diplomacy forswore her dances and dinners ; 
Cc2 



306 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1821. 

I 

the whole accomplished tribe of attaches were in 
dismay ; the chief functionary shut up his doors and 
windows, ordered post-horses, and giving himself 
only time to pen a hurried despatch to the foreign 
office, detailing the vigour with which he had per- 
formed this national duty, fled as if he were flying 
from a pestilence. Foreigners, of course, with theii 
usual adoption of the ambassadorial tone, added theii 
laughter ; until, stung by universal offence, she no 
sooner received the announcement of the death of 
George the Third, than, defying all remonstrance, 
and spurning the tardy attempts of ministers to con- 
ciliate her, she rushed back to England, flaming with 
revenge.* 

Lord Liverpool was utterly unequal to the emer- 
gency: always hitherto a feeble, unpurposed, and 
timid minister, he now put on a preposterous cou- 
rage, and defied this desperate woman. He might 
better have taken a tiger by the beard. He had even 
the folly to bring her to trial. With what ultimate 
object is utterly inconceivable. That he could not 
have obtained a divorce by any law human or di- 
vine, the reasons were obvious. If she had been 
found guilty, he could have neither exiled nor im- 
prisoned her ; his only resource must be her decapi- 
tation. But he knew that the people of England 
would have risen indignantly against so cruel and 
horrid a sentence. There was but one alternative 
remaining — to be defeated; and defeated he was, 
totally, helplessly, ignominiously. 

The queen was probably a criminal, to the full ex- 
tent of the charge. But there had been so long a 
course of espionage, which the English mind justly 
abhors, the practices against her had been so pitiful, 
and the details of the evidence were so repulsive, 
that the crime was forgotten in the public scorn of 
the accusers. This feeling, hpwever suppressed in 

♦ June, 1820. 



1821.] QUEEN CAROLINE. 807 

the higher ranks, took its open way with the multi- 
tude ; and while ministers were forced to steal down 
to the house, or were visible, only to receive all spe- 
cies of insults from the mob, the queen went daily 
to her trial in a popular triumph. Her levees at 
Brandenburg House, a small villa on the banks of the 
Thames, where she resided for the season, were still 
more triumphant. Daily processions of the people 
filled the road. The artisans marched with the 
badges of their callings ; the brotherhoods of trade ; 
the masonic lodges ; the friendly societies ; all the 
nameless incorporations, which make their charters 
without the aid of office, and give their little senates 
laws ; ^own to the fish-women ; paid their respects 
in fall costume, and assured her majesty, in many a 
high-flown piece of eloquence, of her " living in the 
hearts of her faithful people." 

There was, doubtless, some charlatanry in the dis- 
play. Many interests are concerned in evejy move 
of the popular machine. The inn-keepers on the 
road were the richer for this loyalty ; the turnpikes 
reaped a handsomer revenue ; the Jews sold more 
of that finery which has seen its best days; the 
coachmakers issued more of their veteran barouches ; 
the horse-dealers supplied more of those hunters and 
chargers which have bade a long farewell to all their 
fields. All the trades were zealous promoters of 
the processions. The holyday, the summer drive, 
the dress, the "hour's importance to the poor man's 
heart," were not to be forgotten among the accesso- 
ries. But the true motive, paramount to all, was 
honest English disdain at the mode in which the 
evidence had been collected, and the mixture of 
weakness and violence with which the prosecution 
was carried on. Concession after concession was 
forced from ministers. The title of queen was ac- 
knowledged ; and finally. Lord Liverpool, beaten in 
the lords, and become an object of outrageous detest- 
ation to the populace,- admitted that he could pro- 



308 GEORGE THE FOURTH, [1821. 

ceed no further, and withdrew the prosecution. The 
announcement was received with a roar of victory 
in the house. The sound was caught by the multi- 
tude, and London was filled with acclamations. 

The graver judgment of the country regretted, 
that by the rashness which suffered a question of in- 
dividual vice to be mingled with one of public prin- 
ciple, the crime received the sanction which be- 
longed only to the virtue. But the deed was done ; 
and the only hope now was, that it might be speedily 
forgotten. But this the queen would not suffer : 
the furious passions of the woman were still unap- 
--"'^eased. She took a house within sight of the palace, 
that she might present the perpetual offence of her 
mobs to the royal eye : she libelled the king ; she 
pursued him to public places; and persevered in this 
foolish vindictiveness, until she completely lost the 
sympathy of the people. At length, advised only by 
her own hot and bitter heart, she determined to in- 
sult him at the coronation,* in the presence of his 
nobles, and in the highest ceremonial of his throne. 

But this fine display of the old pomps of England 
has been commemorated by so celebrated a master 
of description, that any fragment from his pen on 
such a subject must supersede all other. It has a 
monumental value. 



SIR WALTER SCOTT's LETTER ON THE CORONATION. 

" I refer you to the daily papers for the details of 
the great national assembly which we witnessed 
yesterday, and will hold my promise absolved by 
sending a few general remarks upon what I saw, 
with surprise amounting to astonishment, and which 
I shall never forget. It is indeed impossible to con- 
ceive a ceremony more august «,nd imposing in all 
its parts, and more calculated to make the deepest 

* Wrii July, 1821 



1821.] QUEEN CAROLIP?E. 309 

impression both on the eye and on the feelings. 
The most minute attention must have been bestowed, 
to arrange aU the subordinate parts in harmony with 
the lest; so that, among so much antiquated cere- 
monial, imposing singular dresses, duties, and cha- 
racters upon persons accustomed to move in the 
ordinary routine of society, nothing occurred either 
awkward or ludicrous, which could mar the general 
eifect of the solemnity. Considering that it is but 
one step from the sublime to the ridiculous, I own I 
consider it as surprising that the whole ceremonial 
of the day should have passed away without the 
slightest circumstance which could derange the ge- 
neral tone of solemn feeling which was suited to the 
occasion. 

" You must have heard a full account of the only 
disagreeable event of the day. I mean the attempt 
of the misguided lady who has lately furnished so 
many topics of discussion, to intrude herself upon a 
ceremonial, where, not being in her proper place, to 
be present in any other must have been voluntary 
degradation. That matter is a fire of straw which 
has now burned to the very embers, and those who 
try to blow it into life again will only blacken their 
hands and noses, like mischievous children dabbling 
among the ashes of a bonfire. It seems singular, 
that being determined to be present at all hazards, 
this unfortunate personage should not have procured a 
peer's ticket, which I presume would have ensured her 
admittance. I willingly pass to pleasanter matters. 

" The effect of the scene in the Abbey was be- 
yond measure magnificent. Imagine long galleries 
stretched among the aisles of that venerable and 
august pile — those which rise above the altar peal- 
ing back their echoes to a full and magnificent choir 
of music ; those which occupied the sides filled 
even to crowding with all that Britain has of beau- 
tiful and distinguished ; and the cross-gallery most 
appropriately occupied by the Westminster school- 



310 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1821. 

boys, in their white surplices, many of whom might 
on that day receive impressions never to be lost 
during- the rest of their Hves ; imagine this, I say, 
and then add the spectacle upon the floor — the altars 
surrounded by the fathers of the church — the king, 
encircled by the nobility of the land, and the coun- 
sellors of his throne, and by warriors wearing the 
honoured marks of distinction, bought by many a 
glorious danger ; — add to this the rich spectacle of 
the aisles, crowded with waving plumage, and coro- 
nets, and caps of honour, and the sun, which bright- 
ened and saddened as if on purpose, now beaming 
in full lustre on the rich and varied assemblage, and 
now darting a solitary ray, which catched, as it 
passed, the glittering folds of a banner, or the edge 
of a group of battle-axes or partisans, and then 
rested full on some fair form, ' the cynosure of neigh- 
bouring eyes,' whose circlet of diamonds glistened 
under its influence. 

" Imagine all this, and then tell me if I have made 
my journey of four hundred miles to little purpose. 
I do not love your cut bono men, and therefore I will 
not be pleased if you ask me, in the damping tone 
of sullen philosophy, what good all this has done 
the spectators ? If we restrict life to its real animal 
wants and necessities, we shall indeed be satisfied 
with ' food, clothes, and fire ;' but Divine Providence, 
who widened our sources of enjoyment beyond 
those of the animal creation, never meant that we 
should bound our wishes within such narrow limits ; 
and I shrewdly suspect that those nan est tanti gen- 
tlefolks only depreciate the natural and unaffected 
pleasure which men like me receive from sights of 
splendour and sounds of harmony, either because 
they would seem wiser than their simple neighbours, 
at the expense of being less happy ; or because the 
mere pleasure of the sight and sound is connected 
with associations of a deeper kind, to which they 
are unwilling to yield themselves. 



1821.^ QUEEN CAROLINE. 311 

" Leaving these gentlemen to enjoy their own wis- 
dom, I still more pity those, if there be any, who (be- 
ing unable to detect a peg on which to hang a laugh,) 
sneer coldly at this solemn festival, and are rather dis- 
posed to dwell on the expense which attends it, than 
on the generous feelings which it ought to awaken. 
The expense, so far as it is national, has gone di- 
rectly and instantly to the encouragement of the 
British manufacturer and mechanic ; and so far as it 
is personal to the persons of rank attendant upon the 
coronation, it operates as a tax upon wealth and 
consideration, for the benefit of poverty and indus- 
try ; a tax willingly paid by the one class, and not 
the less acceptable to the other, because it adds a 
happy holyday to the monotony of a life of labour. 

" But there were better things to reward my pil- 
grimage than the mere pleasures of the eye and the 
ear ; for it was impossible, without the deepest ve- 
neration, to behold the voluntary and solemn inter- 
change of vows between the king and his assembled 
people, while he, on the one hand, called God Al- 
mighty to witness his resolution to maintain their 
laws and privileges ; and while they called, at the 
same moment, on the Divine Being, to bear witness 
that they accepted him for their liege sovereign, and 
pledged to him their love and their duty. I cannot 
describe to you the effect produced by the solemn, 
yet strange mixture of the words of Scripture, with 
the shouts and acclamations of the assembled multi- 
tude, as they answered to the voice of the prelate 
who demanded of them whether they acknowledged 
as their monarch the prince who claimed the sove- 
reignty in their presence. 

" It was peculiarly delightful to see the king re- 
ceive from the royal brethren, but in particular from 
the Duke of York, the fraternal kiss, in which they 
acknowledged their sovereign. There was an honest 
tenderness, an affectionate and sincere reverence, in 
the embrace interchanged between the Duke of York 



312 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1821. 

and his majesty, that approached almost to a caress, 
and impressed all present with the electrical con- 
viction, that the nearest to the throne in blood was 
the nearest also in affection. I never heard plaudits 
given more from the heart than those that were 
thundered upon the royal brethren when they were 
thus pressed to each other's bosoms — it was the 
emotion of natural kindness, which, bursting out 
amid ceremonial grandeur, found an answer in every 
British bosom. The king seemed much affected at 
this and one or two other parts of the ceremonial, 
even so much so as to excite some alarm among 
those who saw him as nearly as I did. He com- 
pletely recovered himself, however, and bore, gene- 
rally speaking, the fatigue of the day very well. I 
learn, from one near his person, that he roused 
himself with great energy, even when most op- 
pressed with heat and fatigue, when any of the more 
interesting parts of the ceremony were to be per- 
formed, or when any thing occurred which excited 
his personal and immediate attention. When pre- 
siding at the banquet, amid the long line of his no- 
bles, he looked ' every inch a king ;' and nothing 
could exceed the grace with which he accepted and 
returned the various acts of homage rendered to him 
in the course of that long day. 

" It was also a very gratifying spectacle to those 
who think like me, to behold the Duke of Devonshire 
and most of the distinguished whig nobility assem- 
bled round the throne on this occasion ; giving an 
open testimony that the differences of political opi- 
nions are only skin-deep wounds, which assume at 
times an angry appearance, but have no real effect 
on the wholesome constitution of the country. 

" If you ask me to distinguish who bore him best, 
and appeared most to sustain the character we annex 
to the assistants in such a solemnity, I have no he- 
sitation to name Lord Londonderry; who, in the 
liiagnificent robes of the Garter with the cap and 



1821. J QUEEN CAROLINE. 313 

high plnme of the order, walked alone, and, by his 
fine face and majestic person, formed an adequate 
representative of the Order of Edward III., the cos- 
tume of which was worn by his lordship only. The 
Duke of Wellington, with all his laurels, moved 
and looked deserving the baton, which was never 
grasped by so worthy a hand. The Marquis of 
Anglesea showed the most exquisite grace in ma- 
naging his horse, notwithstanding the want of his 
limb, which he left at Waterloo. I never saw so 
fine a bridle-hand in my life, and I am rather a judge 
of ' noble horsemanship.' Lord Howard's horse 
was worse bitted than those of the two former noble- 
men, but not so much so as to derange the ceremony 
of retiring back out of the Hall. 

" The Champion was performed (as of right) by 
young Dymoke, a fine-looking youth, but bearing, 
perhaps, a little too much the appearance of a maiden- 
knight, to be the challenger of the world in a king's 
behalf. He threw down his gauntlet, however, with 
becoming manhood, and showed as much horseman- 
ship as the crowd of knights and squires around 
him would permit to be exhibited. His armour was 
in good taste ; but his shield was out of all propriety, 
being a round rondache, or highland target, — a de- 
fensive weapon, which it would have been impos- 
sible to use on horseback ; instead of being a three- 
cornered, or heater-shield,vj\i\ch. in time of the tilt was 
suspended round the neck. Pardon this antiquarian 
scruple, which, you may believe, occurred to few 
but myself. On the whole, this striking part of the 
exhibition somewhat disappointed me ; for I would 
have had the champion less embarrassed by his as- 
sistants, and at liberty to put his horse on the grand 
pas. And yet the young Lord of Scrivelsbaye looked 
and behaved extremely well. 

" Returning to the subject of costume, I could not 
but admire what I had previously been disposed much 
to criticise — I mean the fancy-dress of the privy coun- 

Dd 



314 GEORGE THE FOTTRTH. [182L 

sellers, which was of white and blue satin, with trunk 
hose and mantles, after the fashion of Queen Eliza- 
beth's time. Separately, so gay a garb had an odd 
effect on the persons of elderly or ill-made men; 
but when the whole was throAvn into one general 
body, all these discrepancies disappeared, and you no 
more observed the particular manner or appearance 
of an individual, than you do that of a soldier in the 
battalion which marches past you. The whole was 
so completely harmonized in actual colouring, as well 
as in association with the general mass of gay, and 
gorgeous, and antique dress which floated before 
the eye, that it was next to impossible to attend to 
the effect of individual figures. Yet a Scotsman will 
detect a Scotsman among the most crowded assem-» 
blage ; and I must say, that the Lord Justice Clerk 
of Scotland showed to as great advantage in his 
robes of privy counsellor as any by whom that 
splendid dress was worn on this great occasion. 
The common court-dress used by the privy counsellors 
at the last coronation must have had a poor effect 
in comparison of the present, which formed a grada- 
tion in the scale of gorgeous ornament, from the 
unwieldy splendour of the heralds, who glowed like 
huge masses of cloth of gold and silver, to the more 
chastened robes and ermine of the peers. I must not 
forget the effect produced by the peers' placing their 
coronets on their heads, which was really august. 

" The box assigned to the foreign ambassadors 
presented a most brilliant effect, and was perfectly 
in a blaze with diamonds. When the sunshine lighted 
on Prince Esterhazy in particular, he glimmered like 
a galaxy. I cannot learn positively if he had on 
that renowned coat which has visited all the courts 
of Europe, save ours, and is said to be worth 100,000/., 
or some such trifle, and which costs the prince 100/, 
or 200/. eveiy time he puts it on, as he is sure to 
lose pearls to that amount. This was a hussar 
dress, but splendid in the last degree, perhaps too 



i821.] 



QUEEN CAROLINE. 31j5 



fine for good taste, at least it would have appeared 
so any where else. Beside the prince sat a good hu- 
moured lass, who seemed all e)''es and ears (his 
daughter-in-law, I believe), who wore as many- 
diamonds as if they had been Bristol stones. An ho- 
nest Persian was also a remarkable figure, from the 
dogged and imperturbable gravity with which he 
looked on the whole scene, without ever moving a 
limb or a muscle during the space of four hours. Like 
Sir Wilful Witwood, I cannot find that your Persian 
is orthodox ; for if he scorned every thing else, there 
Was a Mahometan paradise extended on his right 
hand along the seats which were occupied by the 
peeresses and their daughters, which the prophet 
himself might have looked on with emotion. I 
have seldom seen so many elegant and beautiful 
girls as sat mingled among the noble matronage of 
the land ; and the waving plumage of feathers, which 
made the universal headdress, had the most appro- 
priate effect in setting off their charms. 

" I must not omit, that the foreigners, who are apt 
to consider us a nation en frac^ and without the 
usual ceremonies of dress and distinction, were ut- 
terly astonished and delighted to see the revival of 
feudal dresses and feudal grandeur when the occasion 
demanded it, and that in a degree of splendour which 
they averred they had never seen paralleled in Europe. 

" The duties of service at the banquet, and of at- 
tendance in general, was performed by pages dressed 
very elegantly in Henri Quatre coats of scarlet, with 
gold lace, blue sashes, white silk hose, and white ro- 
settes. There were also marshals' men for keeping 
order, who wore a similar dress, but of blue, and 
having white sashes. Both departments were filled 
up almost entirely by young gentlemen, many of 
them of the very first condition, who took those me- 
nial characters to gain admission to the show. When 
I saw many of my young acquaintance thus attend- 
ing upon their fathers and kinsmen, the peers, 



316 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1821. 

knights, and so forth, I could not help thhiking of 
Crabbe's lines, with a little alteration — 

'Twas schooling pride to see the menial wait, 
Smile on his father, and receive his plate 

It must be owned, however, that they proved but in- 
different valets, and were very apt, like the clown 
in the pantomime, to eat the cheer they should have 
handed to their masters, and to play other tours de 
page, which reminded me of the caution of our pro- 
verb, ' not to man yourself with your kin." The 
peers, for example, had only a cold collation, while 
the aldermen of London feasted on venison and turtle •, 
and similar errors necessarily befell others in the con- 
fusion of the evening. But those slight mistakes, which 
indeed were not known till afterward, had not the 
slightest effect on the general grandeur of the scene. 

" I did not see the procession between the Abbey 
and Hall. In the morning a few voices called ' Queen ! 
queen !' as Lord Londonderry passed, and even when 
the sovereign appeared. But those were only sig- 
nals for the loud and reiterated acclamations, in 
which these tones of discontent were completely 
drowned. In the return, no one dissonant voice in- 
timated the least dissent from the shouts of gratula- 
tion which poured from every quarter ; and certainly 
never monarch received a more general welcome 
from his assembled subjects. 

" You will have from others full accounts of the 
variety of entertainments provided for John Bull in 
the parks, on the river, in the theatres, and elsewhere. 
Nothing was to be seen or heard but sounds of plea- 
sure and festivity ; and whoever saw the scene at 
any one spot, was convinced that the whole popula- 
tion was assembled there, while others found a simi- 
lar concourse of revellers in every different point! 
It is computed that about 500,0(X) people shared in 
the festival, in one way or other; and you may ima- 
gine the excellent disposition by which the people 



1821.] QUEEN CAROLINE. 317 

were animated, when I tell you that, excepting a few 
windows broken by a small body-guard of ragamuf- 
fins, who were in immediate attendance on the great 
lady in the morning, not the slightest political vio- 
lence occurred to disturb the general harmony ; and 
that the assembled populace seemed to be univer- 
sally actuated by the spirit of the day, namely, loy- 
alty and good-humour* Nothing occurred to damp 
those happy dispositions; the weather was most 
propitious, and the arrangements so perfect, that no 
accident of any kind is reported as having taken place » 
And so concluded the coronation of George IV., 
whom God long preserve ! Those who witnessed it 
have seen a scene calculated to raise the country in 
their opinion, and to throw into the shade all scenes 
of similar magnificence, from the field of the cloth of 
gold down to the present day. 

"AN EYE-WITNESS." 

The unfortunate intrusion to which this letter 
alludes, occurred early in the day. The queen was 
refused entrance into the cathedral ; and when 
she at length, after several efforts, withdrew, the 
mob expressed their sentiments by breaking the mi- 
nisters' windows. But the disappointment was fatal 
to her. She lost her spirits, shrank from society, de- 
claredhers.elf tired oflife, and in less than a month died. 

The ruling passion was strong, even in death. She 
ordered that her remains should not be left in this 
country, but buried in Brunswick ; and that the in- 
scription on her tomb should be, " Here lies Caroline 
of Brunswick, the injured Queen of England." Thus 
perished* a being on whom fortune had lavished all 
the highest advantages of rank, opulence, birth, and 
station, the wife of a royal husband, the mother of a 
royal child ; a queen, and Queen of England ! yet in 
her life and her death scarcely to be envied by a 
galley-slave. 

* 7th August, 1821 

Dd2 



S18 GEORGE THE FOURTH. | 1821 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

Napoleon, 

The battle of Jena, in 1806, had placed Napoleon 
at the height of power. The treaty of Tilsit, in 
1807, had confirmed it ; and the conference at Er- 
furt had indulged his love of display with the most 
profuse spectacle of vassal royalty. But ftom that 
moment the wheel turned ; for the purpose of his 
career was done. — He had scourged the profligacy 
of the continental courts; he had scattered, like 
chalEf before the wind, the armies that had been so 
long the instruments of the blind violences and san- 
guinary ambition of the great continental thrones, 
— thrones that, under the name of Christianity, had 
exhibited in their private excesses and public fero- 
city the spirit of heathenism. Prussia the mfidel, 
Austria the bigot, and Russia the barbarian had been 
transfixed with the spear of an avenger, more god- 
less, prejudiced, and ferocious than them all; the 
standards which they had crimsoned in the blood of 
Poland were gone to moulder in the dust of the In- 
valides ; and now, when the punishment was com- 
plete, the time of the punisher was come. 

In the early part of the year 1812, Napoleon, furious 
at the repugnance of the emperor of Russia to see his 
subjects perish by the Berlin and Milan decrees, pro- 
claimed, in his old oracular style, that " the Russian 
dynasty was no more ;" and followed the oracle by 
a force well calculated to ensure its fulfilment. He 
crossed the Polish provinces with an army the most 
numerous since the days of Xerxes or Attila, but 
which would have passed through their wild myriads. 



1821.] NAPOLEON. 319 

as the cannon-ball through the air. With half a 
million of the finest troops that ever marched to play 
the game of ambition, he broke over the Russian 
frontier ; and was himself undone. 

The narrative of that stupendous contest, — of 
French skill and gallantry, of the stubborn heroism 
of the Russian armies, of cities stormed and in con- 
flagration, of provinces desolated, and of the rage of 
a Russian winter let loose, and covering a march of 
six hundred miles with the French dead, — must not 
be humiliated by the sketch which alone could be 
given of it here. 

Napoleon's defeat was measureless ; ■ of the multi- 
tudes that had followed him across the Niemen, 
scarcely a man returned. But he again found ar- 
mies in the populousness of France ; within a few 
months rushed to the field; fought the bloody battles 
of Bautzen and Lutzen ; was again maddened with 
pride, until he roused the continent against him ; 
and finally at Leipsic was overwhelmed once more. 
The remnant of his army was hunted across the 
Rhine, was hunted through France, was hunted into 
the gates of the capital ; and there, when victory had 
flung Napoleon on the ground, diplomatic blunder- 
ing came to set him on his feet again. To extin- 
guish his ambition, he was suffered to retain the 
imperial title; to destroy his connexion with the 
French military, he was suffered to retain his flag, 
his staff, and a portion of his guard ; and to prevent 
the possibility of his renewing disturbances in France 
or Italy, he was fixed on an island almost within 
sight of both. The consequences were foreseen by 
all mankind — except the emperors, the diplomatists, 
and the Bourbons. 

A year after, while the whole pomp of European 
diplomacy was busied in congress at Vienna, and 
every day saw some new experiment of power, a 
monarchy mutilated, a river given to one potentate, 
or the humbler donative of a million of souls and 



020 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1821 

bodies made over to another; while allegiance and 
iiational feelings were measured off by strips of the 
tnap ; and provinces, with all their old attachments, 
their native interests, and hereditary recollections* 
were distributed by the inch-rule and scissors; — ■ 
proceedings which honest and Christian minds were 
the first to deprecate ; Napoleon's system, without 
Napoleon's tyrant plea ; predatory peace and ami- 
cable violence; a rash and misunderstood policy 
usurping the place of that deference to human feel- 
ings for which alone legislators were made ; — the 
blow came, which rebuked those arbitrary follies ; 
&nd the continent was again plunged into the havoc 
of war. 

Religion and reason equally condemned the con-^ 
gress. There is no clearer truth than, that all po- 
licy is unwise which is unjust, and that no politi- 
cal change can be secure which insults human na- 
ture. The congress bartered provinces as if they 
were cattle-pastures, and computed men by the 
isquare league. A million of Saxons were ordered 
to forget their country, and become Prussians. The 
Genoese were ordered to become Savoyards. The 
Milanese, Austrians. With what indignation would 
Englishmen see themselves thus stripped of their 
old habits and privileges, and dissevered from theii 
country by the diplomatic blade 1 How would the 
man of York listen to the order of congress that 
condemned him to be a Frenchman ; or the man of 
Kent read the ukase that sank him into a Russian 
serf, and bade him, for the rest of his life, worship 
the boot of the czar? The whole transaction was 
a violence to law and nature. It must have broken 
up on the first shock of war. The Belgian insur- 
rection is but a foretaste of the universal proof, that 
the policy Was as weak as it was unchristian, unlaw- 
ful, and unnatural. 

While the princes and envoys at this showy 
conclave were thus twisting their rope of sand 



1821.] NAPOLEON. 321 

the news arrived — that Napoleon had escape(V"and 
that their prisoner was on the throne of the' Tuile- 
ries ! 



They felt themselves so completely outwitted, 
that the ifirst impulse was a general burst of laughter ; 
— "The grand charlatan has outtricked the little 
ones," said the wittiest of Frenchmen. " Voild le 
Congres dissout!^^ had been Napoleon's pithy re- 
mark, as he set his foot on the French shore. His 
words were realized : the Congress broke up in con- 
fusion. Diplomacy vanished, and its place was filled 
by the manlier, more honest, and more merciful 
shape of war. Europe was in arms once more ; and 
England, trusting no longer to subsidies and the 
slippery faith of foreign courts, boldly took that lead 
in the contest which became her rank, her para- 
mount interest in the event, and her established su- 
periority in arms. 

Napoleon's own narrative of the battle of Water- 
loo is one of the most characteristic documents in 
history. Whether dictated or written by him, it is 
full of traits of the man ; the military decision, the 
tone of authority, the calculation, familiar to one 
who always spoke of a battle as a game of chess. 
It discloses, too, his extreme anxiety to vindicate 
his defeat, by the dexterous mode in which he la- 
bours to detect the errors of his victor. It has the 
further interest of being probably the longest and 
most carefully studied composition that ever came 
from the pen of this most extraordinary of soldiers 
and sovereigns. 

Waterloo. 

" Sixth Observation.* — 1st. The French army ma- 
noeuvred on the right of the Sambre on the 13 th 

* " Memoirs relative to the Year 1815," written by Napoleon, at St 
Helena. 



§2J2? 6E0RGE THE FOURTH. [l8*5f(rf 

and 14th. On tlie night of the latter day, it en- 
camped within half a league of the Prussian advanced 
posts. Marshal Blucher had, however, no informa-' 
tion of what was passing ; and on the morning of 
the 15th, when the account reached his head-quar- 
ters that the emperor had entered Charleroi, the 
Prusso-Saxon army was still cantoned over an ex- 
tent of thirty leagues of the country, and it required 
two days to assemble his forces. He ought to have 
advanced his head-quarters to Fleurus on the 15th, 
to have concentrated the cantonments of his army 
within a radius of eight leagues, with advanced 
guards on the debouches of the Meuse and the Sam- 
bre. His army would then have been collected at 
Ligny on the 15th at noon, there to await the attack 
of the French army, or to march against it in the 
evening of that day, and drive it into the Sambre. 

" 2d. But Marshal Blucher, though surprised, per- 
sisted in assembling his army on the heights of Ligny, 
behind Fleurus; thus braving the chance of being 
attacked before his troops could be brought up to 
that position. On the morning of the 16th, he had 
got together only two corps, and the French army 
was already at Fleurus. The third corps joined 
during the day ; but the fourth, under the command 
of General Bulow^ could not come up in time to take 
part in the battle. Marshal Blucher, as soon as he 
knew that the French were at Charleroi, ought not 
to have fixed for the rallying point of his army either 
Fleurus or Ligny, which was already under the can- 
non of his enemy, but Wavres, whither the French 
could not arrive until the 17th. He would thus, be- 
sides, have had all the day and the night of the 16th 
to collect the whole of his army. 

" .Sd< After losing the battle of Ligny, the Prussian 
general, instead of making his retreat on Wavres, 
should have effected it on the army of the Duke of 
Wellington, either on Quatre Bras, as that position 
was maintained, or on Waterloo. The retreat of 



tB21.J NAPOLEON. 323 

Marshal Blucher, on the morning of the 17th, wa« 
altogether absurd, since the two armies, which were, 
on the evening of the 16th, only 3,000 toises distant 
from each other, with the communication of an ex^ 
cellent high road, by which they might consider 
themselves as united, became, on the evening of the 
17th, more than 10,000 toises distant, and were sepa* 
rated by defiles and impracticable roads., 

" The Prussian general violated the three great 
principles of war : 1. To approximate his canton-* 
ments ; 2. To assign, as the rallying point, a place 
at which all his troops could arrive before the enemy; 
3. To operate his retreat on his reinforcements. 

" Seventh Observation. — 1st. The Duke of Welling^ 
ton was surprised in his cantonments. He ought to 
have concentrated them on the 15th, at eight leagues 
around Brussels, placing advanced guards on the 
dihouches of Flanders. The French army had ma^ 
noeuvred for three days before he advanced, and 
twenty-four hours had expired since it commenced 
hostilities. Its head-quarters had been for twelve 
hours at Charleroi, while the English general re- 
mained ignorant of all this at Brussels, and the can^ 
tonments of his army still occupied, in full security, 
an extent of twenty leagues. 

" 2d. The Prince of Saxe-Weimar, whose corps 
formed part of the Anglo-Dutch army, was, on the 
15th, at four in the evening, in position in front of 
Frasne, and knew that the French army was at 
Charleroi. Had he immediately sent off an aid-de- 
camp to Brussels, he might have arrived there by 
six in the evening ; and yet the Duke of Wellington 
was not informed of the French army being at Char^ 
leroi until eleven o'clock. Thus he lost five hours,, 
when his situation, and the man opposed to him, ren^ 
dered the loss of a single hour of great importance, 

" 3d. The infantry, the cavalry, and the artillery 
of that army being separately cantoned, the infantry 
was engaged at Quatre Bras without either cavalry, 



324 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1821. 

or artillery ; those troops had thus to sustain a great 
loss, as they were obliged to keep in close column 
to make head against the charges of the cuirassiers, 
under a fire of fifty pieces of cannon. Those brave 
men were, therefore, slaughtered, without cavalry to 
protect them, and without artillery to avenge them. 
As the three kinds of military force cannot for a mo- 
ment dispense with the support of each other, they 
ought always to be so cantoned and posted as to af- 
ford reciprocal assistance. 

"The English general, though surprised, assigned 
Quatre Bras for the rallying point of his army, 
though that position had been for twenty-four hours 
in the possession of the French. He exposed his 
troops to be partially defeated, in proportion as they 
might arrive. The danger to which he exposed them 
was even still more serious, since he made them ad- 
vance without artillery and cavalry ; he delivered up 
his infantry in fragments, unsupported by the other 
two weapons of war, to its enemy. The point for 
assembling his army should have been Waterloo. 
He would thus have had all the 16th, and the night 
of that day to the 17th, which would have been suf- 
ficient for collecting the whole of his army — infantry, 
cavalry, and artillery. The French could not arrive 
till the 17th, and would then have found all his army 
in position. 

"^Eighth Observation. — On the 18th, the English 
general gave battle at Waterloo. This conduct was 
contrary to the interests of his nation, to the general 
plan of the war adopted by the allies, and he violated 
all the rules of war. It was not the interest of Eng- 
land, which needs so many men to recruit her ar- 
mies in India, her American colonies, and her other 
vast establishments, to rmi wantonly into a murder- 
ous contest, which might occasion the loss of her 
only army, or at least cause her best blood to be 
shed. The plan of the allies was to act in mass, 
and not to engage in any partial affair. Nothing 



1821.] NAPOLEON. 325 

was more contrary to their interest and their plan, 
than to expose the success of their cause to the 
chances of a battle, with nearly equal forces, where 
all the probabihties were against them. Had the 
Anglo-Dutch army been destroyed at Waterloo, what 
advantage could the allies have derived from their 
numerous armies, which were preparing to pass the 
Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees 1 

" 2d. The English general, in preparing to fight 
the battle of Waterloo, founded his resolution only 
on the co-operation of the Prussians ; but that co- 
operation could not take place until the afternoon. 
Accordingly, he remained exposed singly, from four 
in the morning till five in the evening ; that is to say, 
during thirteen hours. A battle does not usually 
last more than six hours. This co-operation was, 
therefore, illusory. 

"But, in reckoning on the co-operation of the 
Prussians, he must have supposed that the whole of 
the French army was opposed to him ; in that case, 
he expected to defend his field of battle for thirteen 
hours with 90,000 troops, of different nations, against 
104,000 French. This calculation was clearly erro- 
neous. He could not have maintained his position 
three hours ; every thing would have been decided 
by eight in the morning, and the Prussians would 
have arrived only to fall into the snare. In one 
day, both armies would have been destroyed. 

" If he calculated that a part of the French arniy 
had, according to the rules of war, followed the 
Prussian army, it must then have been evident to 
him, that he could have no assistance from it ; and 
that the Prussians, after being beaten at Lign)'', with 
the loss of from 25,000 to 30,000 men, and with 
20,000 of them dispersed, and pursued by between 
30,000 and 40,000 victorious French, could scarcely 
be expected to maintain themselves. In this case, 
the Anglo-Dutch army alone would have had to sus- 
tain the attack of 69,000 French during the whole of 



326 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1821 

the 18th; and there is no Englishman but will admit 
that the result of such a contest could not be doubtful, 
and that their army was not so constituted as to with- 
stand the shock of the imperial army for four hours. 

" During the night of the 17th, the weather was 
extremely bad, which rendered the ground imprac- 
ticable till nine in the morning. The loss of six 
hours from daybreak was all to the advantage of the 
enemy ; but could the general make the fate of such 
a contest depend on the weather of that night? 
Marshal Grouchy, with 34,000 men and 108 pieces 
of cannon, discovered the secret which seemed to 
be undiscoverable, — not to be, on the 18th, either on 
the field of battle of Mont St. Jean or at Wavres. 
But had the English general the conviction that this 
marshal would wander out of his way in this man- 
ner ] The conduct of Marshal Grouchy was as im- 
possible to be foreseen, as if upon the road his army 
had experienced an earthquake that swallowed it up. 

^'■Recapitulation, — If Marshal Grouchy had been 
on the field of battle at Mont St. Jean, as the English 
and the Prussian generals believed, during the whole 
of the night of the 17th and the morning of the 18th ; 
and if the weather had permitted the French army to 
be drawn up in battle array at four in the morning ; 
before seven o'clock the Anglo-Dutch army would 
have been cut to pieces, dispersed, and entirely de- 
stroyed. If the weather had only permitted the 
French army to range itself in order of battle at ten 
o'clock, the Anglo-Dutch army would have been un- 
done. Its remains would have been driven beyond 
the forest, or in the direction of Halle, and we should 
have had time in the evening to encounter Marshal 
Blucher, and to inflict upon him a similar fate. If 
Marshal Grouchy had encamped before Wavres on 
the night of the 17th, the Prussian army could have 
sent no detachment to save the English army, and 
ihe latter would have been completely beaten by the 
69,000 French opposed to it 



1821.J NAPOLEON. 327 

" 8d. The position of Mont St. Jean was badl;j 
chosen. The first condition of a field of battle is td 
have no defiles in the rear. During the battle, the 
English general could derive no aid from his nume- 
rous cavalry. He did not believe that he would be; 
or could be, attacked on the left. He imagined that 
he would be attacked on the right. In spite of the 
diversion made in his favour by the 30,000 Prussians 
under Bulow, he would have twice made his retreat 
during the day, had it been possible ; thus, in fact, by 
a strange caprice of human aifairs, the bad choice of 
the field of battle, which rendered his retreat impos- 
sible, was the cause of his success. 

" Ninth Observation. — It will be asked, what then 
ought the English general to have done after the battle 
of Ligny, and the engagement at Quatre Bras 1 Pos- 
terity will not form true opinions. He should have 
traversed, in the night of the 17th, the forest of 
Soignes,on the high road of Charleroi ; the Prussian 
army should, in the same manner, have passed along 
that of Wavres. The two armies should have united 
at daybreak at Brussels ; should have left the rear- 
guard to defend the forest ; should have gained some 
days to allow time to the Prussians who were dis- 
persed after the battle of Ligny to rejoin their arniy; 
should have procured the reinforcement of the four- 
teen English regiments that garrisoned the for- 
tresses of Belgium, and had landed at Ostend on 
their return from America ; and should have allowed 
the emperor of the French to manoBuvre as he 
pleased. 

Would he, with an anny of 100,000 men, have tra- 
versed the forest of Soignes, to attack at its debouches 
the two united armies, more than 200,000 strong, and 
in position? This certainly would have been the 
most advantageous course for the allies. Would he 
have been contented to take up a position himself? 
In that case, his inactivity could not have been long, 
as 300,000 Russians, Austrians. Bavarians, &c., had 



328 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1821. 

arrived on the Rhine, who would soon have been on 
the Maine, and obhged him to retreat for the defence 
of the capital. Then the Anglo-Prussian army should 
have marched and joined the allies before Paris. It 
would have run no hazard ; it would have experienced 
no loss; it would have acted conformably to the 
English nation ; to the general plan adopted by the, 
alHes, and to the rules of the art of war. From the' 
15th to the 18th, the Duke of Wellington constantly 
manoeuvred as his enemy desired, and did nothing as 
it was feared he would do. The EngHsh infantry 
was firm and solid. The cavalry might have acted 
better. The Anglo-Dutch army was twice saved on 
the 18th by the Prussians ; first, by the arrival of 
General Bulow, before three o'clock, with 30,000 
men ; and secondly, by the arrival of Marshal Blu- 
cher, with 31,000 men. On that day, 69,000 French- 
men beat 120,000 men. The victory w^as snatched 
from them between eight and nine o'clock, but it was 
by 150,000 men. 

" Let any one imagine the looks of the people of 
London, at the moment when they should have heard 
the catastrophe of their army, and learned that they 
lavished their purest blood to support the cause 
of kings against nations, — of privileges against equal- 
ity, — of oligarchs against liberals, — of the principles 
of the holy alliance against those of the sovereignty 
of the people." 

To this striking paper there is one answer, equiva- 
lent to all, — that its writer was beaten ; and beaten 
in the fairest competition of bravery and skill per- 
haps ever furnished by an European field ! Napo- 
leon had begun the battle at his own time, with his 
chosen army, and with the most perfect conviction 
that he would rout his adversary. The battle was not 
one of those brief encounteis in which fortune may 
have a share. It was a firm struggle from eleven in 
the forenoon until seven in the evening ; and in that 



1S21.] NAPOLEON. 329 

time, the whole power of France had made no 
impression on the English line. The advance of the 
Prussians had no share in this ; and the final charge 
of the enemy was repelled, anfl returned with de- 
cisive slaughter, before the Prussians had come in 
contact with their line. The battle was fought and 
gained by the English and their general. But the 
presence of the Prussians on the field was necessary to 
make the success available ; and while their bravery 
is undoubted, they must be refused any larger portion 
in the glories of this great day. 

The composition of the rival armies is not to be 
forgotten. The French was formed of the picked 
troops of the country, all French, all connecting 
their fame, and many their existence, with their ge- 
neral's victory. The Duke of Wellington had a mis- 
cellaneous army of foreigners, mixed with scarcely 
more than 25,000 English ; the former, chiefly new 
subjects of the allies ; and the latter chiefly recruits 
from the militia. It is to his high honour as a sol- 
dier, that with this embarrassing force, he was able 
to sustain the shock of the longest battle of the war, 
against the most practised and desperate army of 
Europe, and against a general who will be renowned 
while military genius glitters in the eye of man. 

The personal interest which the French soldiery 
took in this war was unequalled. Many of them had 
been prisoners, more had been dismissed from the 
army by the Bourbons, and all had felt their self- 
glory deeply tarnished by the successes of the allies. 
Many of the regiments which marched through 
Paris on their way to Belgium had covered theii 
standards with crape, never to be taken off" but on the 
day of complete victory. Many of them pledged 
themselves never to give nor take quarter. They 
swore peculiar vengeance against the English and 
Prussians ; and bade farewell to Paris, with some- 
thing of a solemn devotement, which was not to 
Ee2 



330 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1821. 

be withdrawn until they had swept the enemy from 
the face of the eartli. 

In Napoleon's statement of the battle he praises 
the firmness of the 'English infantry : and they de- 
served more than his panegyric. They were as solid 
as adamant. A curious anecdote of the opinion of 
one of the enemy, has been remembered. 

It was an etiquette that the commandants of the 
towns through which the French emperor passed at 
any time, should attend him to a certain distance on 
his journey. One of those officers, on the frontier, 
had attended him to the scene of the campaign, and 
was present at the battle of Quatre Bras. On re- 
(urning to his garrison at the close of the day, his 
officers crowded round him at supper, and were 
varm in their anticipations of victory. " The em- 
peror was there. The result was inevitable, — the 
whole was a matter of calculation. The enemy's 
corps must be beaten in detail. The Prussians 
must be cut in pieces. A few of the English 
might take shelter in Brussels, or reach their ships. 
But the business was settled — the emperor w^as 
there." 

The commandant suffered them to indulge in this 
national verbiage, and proceeded in his supper without 
a word. At length, one, more systematic in his style 
than the rest, observed, " that it would be proper to 
keep, the garrison on the alert during the next day, 
for the reception of the aids-de-camp, who would 
be passing to Paris with the news of the victory ; and 
that the guns should be ready for ayew-cZe-joie." 

The opinion was received with high approbation 
by all but the commandant, who, setting down his 
glass, gravely said, — " Messieurs, I have the highest 
opinion of the emperor's genius, and the invincible 
courage of our brave army. But, Messieurs, listen ; 
I was beside Marshal Ney this day for four hours ; 
and brave as we all know he is, and at the head of 



1821.] NAPOLEON. 331 

forty thousand of the best troops of France, he had 
as much as he could do." 

The observation had its effect ; but the officers 
soon rallied, and said, — That, of course, the marshal 
could not be expected to do more than keep the 
enemy in check, and that he would have been wrong 
to press the whole British army. " Messieurs," said 
the general, in the same grave tone, " the marshal 
had not the whole British army bftfore him. He had, 
with some Dutch and Germans, but six British regi- 
ments. I am told that Wellington has thirty regi- 
ments ; and if they are of the same stuff" that I saw 
fighting to-day, I shall wait for an order from the 
emperor before I load my guns." 

Ney, always remarkable for intrepidity, the coruV' 
de-lion valour that seemed to delight in danger, ac- 
knowledged afterward, that he had no idea of the 
fire of musketry, until he saw that of the British. 
He had, at least, one close opportunity of observing 
its effect. Among the anecdotes of the day of Wa- 
terloo that have not yet transpired in print, it is men- 
tioned, that Ney, having had his horse shot under him 
in the last advance of the imperial guard, just as he 
was disengaging himself from the animal, was re- 
cognised by an officer commanding a British com- 
pany. The officer, in his eagerness, calling out, 
" There is the marshal, there is Ney," the whole 
company fired a volley full on the struggling mar'>hal. 
He escaped, by -little short of miracle ; but afterward 
declared, that " he had never been in such an explo- 
sion in his life ! it was a whirlwind of bullets and 
sulphur ; a furnace, — a volcano." 

Ney, perhaps, wished to have died at Waterloo. 
But he was reserved for a more unhappy fate ; by 
which he ouglit not to have died, and which remains 
among the darkest accusations of France and history 
against the exiled royal family. 

The battle of Waterloo was long considered by 
-the French as the laost formidable of all calamities, 



332 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [182T. 

while it was obviously the most singular instance of 
good fortune ; it had put an end to the war in a week, 
and thus saved France from the invasion of a million 
one hundred and ten thousand ! of the allied troops 
who were waiting but the signal to march, and who 
were to be followed by as many more. A war on 
this scale must have trampled the country into a mire 
of blood. But the defeat rendered still higher ser- 
vices. If Napoleon had remained the conqueror, he 
would have remained the tyrant. His overthrow was 
the birth of the French constitution. 

Yet the people, stung with the immediate sense 
of failure, could not be reconciled to the name of 
Waterloo. The feeling exhibited itself on all occa- 
sions. — During the occupation of France by the al- 
lies, one evening, in the chateau of a seigneur, where 
some British officers were quartered, the conversation 
turned upon the war. The politeness of the seigneur 
to his guests was uniformly such, that all topics were 
discussed in the most amicable manner. " I ac- 
knowledge," said the Frenchman, " that Napoleon 
played the fool in his determined hostility to Eng- 
land ; that his commercial decrees were cruel and 
useless ; and that his threats of invasion could never 
have produced any thing but his own ruin, while 
you had your fleet." 

" No," said one of the officers, " nor if he had our 
fleet ; recollect the population, the army." 

" True," was the reply; "yet if Napoleon could 
have found a bridge to Dover, rely upon it, he would 
have found a road to London." 

" Your French troops march too slow," said the 
officer. 

" Mon Dieu ! they are the quickest marchers in 
the world," exclaimed the astonished Frenchman. 

" Pardon me, my dear sir," said the officer, com- 
posedly ; " London is a great way off". Now, it is 
not quite five leagues from Mont St. Jean to Brussels ; 
y^t I saw the French armv set out, to march from 



1821.] NAPOLEON. 33a 

Mont St. Jean to Brussels, six months ago, and it has 
not yet got further than Waterloo." 

The error of sending Napoleon to Elba was not 
repeated. St. Helena was chosen, as the spot in 
which he could enjoy the largest portion of personal 
liberty without hazarding an escape, which might 
inflame France again : and in that island he continued 
until he died. Much as this fate of such a man must 
be regretted, it was indispensable to the peace of 
Europe. Napoleon at large would have been a 
firebrand ; and the lives of thousands or of milhons 
might have paid the forfeit of a second display of 
clemency. In St. Helena he lingered out six dreary 
years in indolent restlessness and impatient resigna 
tion ; talking loftily of his scorn for all things human, 
and quarrelling with Sir Hudson Lowe upon every 
subject under heaven; sometimes writing memoirs, 
which he generally burned ; sometimes rearing cab- 
bages, and shooting the buffaloes that intruded on 
his crop ; sometimes taking obvious pleasure in the 
homage naturally paid to him by the visiters to the 
island ; and, at others, shutting himself up in impe- 
rial solitude, and declaring that he would not be 
"made a wild beast of," to please the "barbarian 
English :" at intervals reviving the recollections of 
his high estate, and speaking with all his former in- 
tenseness and brilliancy; then silent for days to- 
gether; constant in nothing but his hatred of Sir 
Hudson Lowe, his wrath against Marmont, and his 
contempt for every being that bore the name of 
Bourbon. 

Those caprices were the natural results of a change 
so total ; from the most active and engrossing career 
of man, to the most shapeless and monotonous inac- 
tion. In the beginning of 1821, the last year of his 
life, he complained of some inward distemper ; for 
which his physicians found every name, and admi- 
nistered every remedy, but the right one. He tried 
to direct them to it, by saying that his father had died 



334 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1821 

of an ulcerated stomach, and that the complaint had 
probably descended to himself. But the physicians 
persevered, with the vigour of science, until their 
patient refused to take their medicines any longer. 
From the 17th of March his illness confined him to 
his room. He had an old contempt for medicine. 
" Our body is a watch," said he, " intended to go for 
a given time. The doctor is a watchmaker who can- 
not open the watch ; he must therefore work by ac- 
cident ; and for once that he mends it with his crooked 
instruments, he injures it ten times, until he destroys 
it altogether." In April, his Italian physician, An- 
tommarchi, called in Dr. Arnot, an Englishman. 
Still his patient said, with the Turk, " What is writ- 
ten is written ; man's hours are marked. None can 
live beyond their time." 

In this absurd idea, which might have proceeded 
from the growing feebleness of his mind in the pro- 
gress of his disease, he continued to refuse the alle- 
viation which the skill of his English attendant might 
have afforded, for cure was impossible. He now 
drew up his will, and directed that his body should be 
opened, and its state described to his son. " Of all 
my organs," said he, " the stomach is the most dis- 
eased. I believe that the disease is scirrhus of the 
pylorus. The physicians at Montpellier predicted 
that it would be hereditary in our family." Tumult- 
uous and fierce as his life had been, he died with 
some sentiments of religion. He had sent for two 
Italian priests some time before, and he calmly de- 
sired that the usual ceremonies of the Romish church 
should be complied with. In his last hours, he made 
this summary confession of his faith. " I am neither 
physicien nor philosophe* I believe in God, and am 
of the religion of my father. I was born a Catholic, 
and will fulfil all the duties of that church, and re- 
ceive the assistance which she administers." 

* Infidel. 



1821.] 



NAPOLEON. 335 



His hours were now numbered. His complaint 
was cancer of the stomach. From the 3d of May, 
he seemed to be in a continued heavy sleep. The 
fifth was a day of unexampled tempest in the island ; 
trees were every where torn up by the rocrts, the sea 
lashed and rent the shores, the clouds poured down 
torrents, the wind burst through the hills with the 
loudness of thunder. In this roar of the elements, 
Napoleon perhaps heard the old echoes of battle ; 
the last words on his lips were of war ; " tete d'ar- 
•iin^e''' v/as uttered in his dream, — and he died. The 
fiery spirit passed away, like Cromwell's, in storm ! 

The coup cfc&il of his rise and fall exhibits the 
most various, vivid, and dazzling career ever known ; 
the mightiest events and most singular vicissitudes 
ever crowded into the history of one man. 

CHRONOLOGY OF THE LIFE OF NAPOLEON. 

1769 — August 15. Born at Ajaccio, in Corsica. 

1779 — Placed at the military school of Brienne. 

1793 — An officer of artillery at the siege of Toulon, and appbinted gene- 
ral of brigade. 

1794— Commands the conventional troops, and defeats the Parisians. 

1796 — Appointed to the command of the army of Italy — Battle of Lodi 
. — Battle of Castiglione — Battle of Areola. 

1797 — Surrender of Mantua and Trieste. Afril 18. Preliminaries 
with Arstria signed at Leoben — French take possession of Venice — 
Treaty of Campo Formio, with Austria, 

1798 — Sails for Egypt — Battle of Embade, or the Pyramids. 

1799 — May. Siege of Acre — Sails to France. Oct. 7. Lands at Fre- 
jus. Nov. 9. Dissolves the conventional government. Nov. 10. De- 
clared first consul. '^^-^r^.,. 

1800 — Peace made with the Chouans — Crosses Mont St. Bernard. 
June 16. Battle of Marengo — Preliminaries with Austria signed at Paris 
Dec. 24. Explosion of the infernal machine. 

1801— Treaty of Luneville with Austria— Preliminaries signed with 
England. 

1802 — The Cisalpine Republic placed under his jurisdiction. March 
27. Definitive treaty with England — Legion of Honour instituted. Av^ 
gust 2. Declared consul for life — Swiss form of government changed by 
him. 

\&)Z~-May 18. English declaration of war. June 5. Hanover con- 
quered. 

1804— Feft. Moreau arrested. March 20. Death of the Due d'Enghien 
— Pichegru dies in prison. May 18. He is declared Emperor. Nov. 19. 
Crowned by the Pope. 

1805— Writes a pacific letter to the King of England. April 11. Tmaty 
of Petersburg, between Engiaad, Russia, Austria, and Sweden— -Ue is 



836 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1821. 

declared King of Italy — Mack's army surrenders at Ulm — French enter 
Vienna— Battle of Austerlitz — Treaty of Vienna with Prussia"~and of 
Presburg with Austria. 

1806 — March 30. Joseph Buonaparte declared King of Naples. June 
5. Louis Buonaparte declared King of Holland — Confederation of the 
Rhine — Marches against Prussia — Battle of Auerstadt or Jena — Enters 
Berlin. Nov. 19. Hamburgh taken. 

1807— Battle of Eylau— of Friedland— Treaty of Tilsit. 

1808 — July 7. Joseph Buonaparte declared King of Spain— 20. Surren- 
der of Dupont's army at Baylen — 29. Joseph evacuates Madrid. Aug. 

21 . Battle of Vimiera. Nov. 5. Buonaparte arrive'' ai Vittoria. Dec. 4. 
Surrender of Madrid. 

1809 — January BAttle of Corunna — Returns to Paris. April. War 
declared by Austria — Heads his army against Austria. May 10. French 
enter Vienna — Battle of Asperne. July 5. Battle of Wagram — Flushing 
taken by the English — Treaty of Vienna with Austria. Dec. Lucien 
Buonaparte arrives in England — Marriage with Josephine dissolved — 
Walcheren evacuated by the English. 

1810 — March. Marries Maria Louisa, daughter of Francis 11. July. 
Holland and the Hanse Towns annexed to ihe French empire. August 
Bernadotte elected Crown-Prin':e of Sweden. 

1811 — January I. Hamburgh annexed to the empire. April 20. The 
empress delivered of a son, who is styled Khig of Rome. 

1812 — January. Swedish Pomerania seized by France. May. Heads 
the army against Russia. Jmtic 11. Arrives at Konigsberg. 28. Enters 
Wilna. Aug. 18. Smolensko taken. Sept. 7. Battle of the Moskwa, or 
Borodino. 14. French enter Moscow. Oct. 22. Evacuate it. Nov. 9. 
Arrives at Smolensko. Lee. 5. Quits the army. 18. Arrives at Paris. 

1813 — April. Takes the command of the army on the Elbe. May I. 
Banle of Lutzen. 20. Of Bautzen. June 4:. Armistice agreed on. 21. 
Battle of Vittoria. Aug. 17. Hostilities recommence. 28. Battle of 
Dresden. Sept 7. English enter France. 28. French evacuate Dresden. 
Oct. 18. Battle of Leijisic. Nov. 15. Revolution in Holland. Dec. 8. 
English army crosses the Nieve. 

1814 — Jan. 1. Allies cross the Rhine. March 30. Battle of Mont- 
martre. 31. Allies enter Paris. April 11. Napoleon abdicates the throne. 
May 8. Arrives at Elba. 

1815 — March I. Relands in France at Cannes. 20. Resumes the 
throne. June 1. Holds the Champ-de-Mai. 11. Leaves Paris for Bel- 
gium. 15. Attacks the Prussians on the Sambre. 16. Attacks Blucher 
at Ligny — and Wellington at Quatre Bras. 18. Defeated at Waterloo. 

22. Resigns the throne, finishing the hundred days. 29. Leaves Mal- 
maison. July 15. Received on board the Bellerophon. 24. At Torbay. 
Aug. 8. Sails in the Northumberland for St. Helena. Oct. 1& Lands at 
St. "Helena. 

l%2l— March 17. Confined by illness. May 5. Dies 



1821.] THE REIGN* 337 



CHAPTER XIX. 

The Reign. 

In his earlier years the king had never passed the 
limits of England. Etiquette and financial reasons 
were the cause. But he suffered little by the restric- 
tion. He spoke with sufficient ease all the foreign 
languages required at court ; and if he lost some in- 
dulgence of rational curiosity, and some knowledge 
of the actual aspect of the continent; he gained 
much more than an equivalent, in escaping those fo- 
reign follies which are so irreconcilably repulsive 
to the tastes of England. The hussar passion was 
not strong upon him; and though commanding a 
cavalry regiment, and fond of the allowable decora- 
tion of the soldier, it was to more travelled propen- 
sities that we owed the frippery which, for so many 
years, turned some of the finest portions of the 
British service into a paltry imitation of the worst 
of the foreign; disguised brave men in the trap- 
pings of mountebanks, and made a British parade 
the rival of a rehearsal at Astley's — a triumph of 
tailors. He never appeared before his people disfi- 
gured with the German barbarism of a pipe in the 
mouth, nor with the human face divine metamor- 
phosed into the bear's or the baboon's. He was an 
English gentleman ; and, conscious that the character 
placed him above the grossness of foreign indul- 
gences, or the theatric fopperies of foreign costumes, 
he adhered to the manners of his country. 

But, immediately on his accession to the throne, 
he visited Ireland,* Hanover,t and Scotland,! and in 

* August, 1821. t September, 1821 t August, 1822 

Ff 



338 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1821. 

hem all was received with the strongest marks of 
popular affection. While in Scotland, the intelli- 
gence of the Marquis of Londonderry's death reached 
him. The Marquis had died by his own hand ! The 
fatigues of public business, added to some domestic 
vexations, had disordered his brain, and, after a brief 
period of despondency, he put an end to his exist- 
ence. England regretted him as a high-minded 
statesman ; but Ireland had no sorrow for the peipe- 
trator of the Union, — a measure which, though fully 
merited by the popish propensities of the legislature, 
yet ojffended the just pride of the people, and was 
accomplished by a process of such lavish corruption, 
such open-faced and scandalous bargain and sale, as 
aggravated the insult, imbittered the national neces- 
sity of the transaction, and stamped the last shame 
on the brow of a fallen country. 

From the close of the French war, England had 
remained in peace for ten years, with the exception 
of a war of one day with the Algerines, in 1816. 
Those barbarians had massacred a crowd of unfor- 
tunate Italians trading and fishing at Bona, under the 
British flag. The insult could not be passed over : 
and a fleet of ten sail were instantly despatched to 
demand satisfaction for this act of savagery. The 
dey scoff'sd at the demand ; and the fleet, under 
Lord FiXmouth, seconded by a Dutch squadron, under 
Admiral Vo% der Capellen, tore his massive fortifi- 
cations to pieces in a six hours' fire. The dey was 
forced to make the humblest apology, to beg pardon 
of the British consul, and, by a more gratifying re- 
sult of victory, to deliver up all his Christian captives, 
and pledge himself to abolish piracy in his dominions. 
The latter condition, with the usual faith of barba- 
ians, he violated as soon as the British fleet were 
under sail. But Lord Exmouth had the high honour 
of sending to Italy, where they marched in solemn 
thanksgiving procession to their churches, five 
hundred human beings, who, but for his success. 



1821.] THE REIGN. 339 

would probably have finished their miserable lives in 
chains. 

This was the boldest action ever fought with bat- 
teries alone, and the most bloody to both the victors 
and the vanquished. The Algerine batteries were con- 
tinually reinforced during the day, and their loss was 
computed at four thousand men killed and wounded. 
A. comparison with the battles of the line, makes the. 
loss in the fleet the severest ever known, in proportion 
to the numbers engaged. 

In the action of the 1st of June, there were 26 sail 
of the line (including the Audacious) in action, with 
about 17,000 men; of those 281 were killed, and 797 
wounded. Total 1078. 

In Lord Bridport's action 23d June, 1795, there 
were 14 sail, with about 10,000 men ; of whom only 
31 were killed, and 113 wounded. Total 144. 

In the action off Cape St. Vincent, there were 15 
sail of the line, with about 10,000 men; of whom 
were killed 73, and wounded 227. Total 300. 

In Lord Duncan's action, 11th Oct. 1797, there 
were 16 sail of the line (including two 50's) engaged, 
with about 8000 men ; of whom 191 were killed, and 
560 wounded. Total 751. 

In the battle of the Nile, 1st Aug. 1798, there were 
14 sail of the line engaged, with about 8000 men ; of 
whom 218 were killed, and 677 wounded. Total 895. 

In Lord Nelson's attack on Copenhagen, 2d April, 
1801, there were 11 sail of the line and 5 frigates en- 
gaged, with about 7000 men ; of whom 234 were 
killed, and 641 wounded. Total 875. 

In the battle of Trafalgar, 21st 0(;t. 1805, there 
were 27 sail of the line engaged, with about 17,000 
men ; of whom 412 were killed, and 1112 wounded. 
Total 1524. 

In the attack on Algiers there were 5 sail of the 
line and 5 frigates engaged, the crews of which 
may be computed at 5000 men ; of whom 128 were 
killed, and 690 wounded. Total 818.— If the Dutch 



340 GEORGE THE FOTJRTH. [l82l 

frigates were added, they may be taken at 1500, of 
whom 13 were killed, and 32 wounded ; so that the 
totals would be, of 6500 men, 141 killed, and 722 
wounded. Total 863. 

The dey paid the penalty of his defeat ; he was 
strangled in a few months after. A successor was 
easily found ; piracy flourished again, and Algiers 
luxuriated in its old system of strangling its go- 
vernors, and robbing on the high seas ; until the late 
French expedition extinguished the dynasty. 

Peace was complete ; but it threatened to involve 
Europe in distresses scarcely less severe than those 
of the most active hostilities. In the mean time, the 
chief territorial changes, on the basis of the treaty 
of Paris,* proceeded. The imperial conquests were 
lopped away from France, and she was reduced to 
her possessions in 1792. The celebrated Confedera- 
tion of the Rhine, which Napoleon had considered 
the master-stroke of his policy, and which made the 
whole of the minor German principalities but an out- 
work of France, was demolished by a touch of the 
pen, and a new league created in its room, from 
which French influence was totally excluded. 
Switzerland was left to its old governments; but 
Italy was given over to the sullen and unpopular 
yoke of Austria. Some of her West Indian islands 
were restored to France ; Java was given to the 
Putch ; but England retained the true prizes of the 
war, Malta, the Cape, and the Ionian Islands. 

In the same memorable year a close had been put 
to the American war ; a war of frigates,! idly begun, 
and willingly concluded on both sides. America 
took some of the British cruisers, ill manned, and ill 
provided ; balancing her success by a series of fool- 
ish expeditions into Canada, all which were beaten ; 
the war costing her enormous sums of money, with the 
imminent liazard of a separation between her northern 

* 30th March, 1814, 
t See Note Yl.—Pag-e 413. 



1625.] THE REIGN. 341 

and southern states, the total stoppage of her com- 
merce, and the loss of many thousand lives. Eng- 
land closed her exploits by an attack on New-Or- 
leans, which her expedition fortunately failed to take. 
The project itself excited strong criticism, — the coun- 
try was a swamp, the city was a regular place of 
pestilence, where even the natives perish in yearly 
swarms by the contagion; and what must be the 
mortality of the British soldier ? Had we not already 
sufficient swamps and fevers in the West Indies, to 
carry off the superfluity of our soldiership 1 The 
possession of this deplorable place would have been 
a perpetual source of irritation to America ; and would 
have cost the lives of a thousand men a-year until it 
involved us in a new quarrel, which might cost the 
lives of ten thousands.* 

The distresses of the peace became universal. 
From London to the Andes on one side, and from 
London to the wall of China on the other, the cessa- 
tion of that vivid and violent effort of folly, ambition, 
courage, and phrensy, all combined under the name of 
war, produced a languor scarcely less fatal than the 
sword. Bankruptcy spread, like a vast fog, over Eng- 
land, America, France, and Germany, at the same 
moment. But the vigour of England is incalculable. 
No country is so perpetually tampered with by theo- 
rists ; but no country can bear tampering so well : 
she outworks their follies. Her commerce reco- 
vered :, wealth rolled in upon her in a flood. Theory 
now plumed its broadest wings again: even the 
grimness of ministerial finance was lost in the ge- 
neral intoxication ; and Lord Goderich's speech, as 
chancellor of the exchequer,! — that famous speech, 
in which he professed himself unable to pour out his 
soul in language sufficiently glowing for the golden 
prospects before him; a proud example of the clear- 
lightedness of the prophetic budget ! gave the sanc- 

* See Note vn.—Page 414. 
tl825. 

Ff2 



342 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1825. 

tion of one of the most solemn of orators and stub- 
born of financiers to the national dream. But his 
lordship had scarcely congratulated his countrymen 
on their too abundant prosperity, when the whole fell 
into dust before his eyes — the vision vanished, the 
rejoicing was dumb, the wealth was paper ; the 
princes of the modern Tyre were outcasts, fugitives, 
beggars. Seventy-five banks broke in as many days. 
Two hundred and fifty joint-stock companies, which 
but the week before would have contracted to throw 
a bridge across the Atlantic, make a railway round the 
globe, or dig a tunnel to the antipodes, were in the 
gazette without a solvent subscriber or an available 
shilling. 

The joint-stocks deserve a historian of their own. 
The loftiest exploits of speculation hid their dimi- 
nished heads before this colossal first-born of the 
nineteenth century of swindling. Law's scheme, 
tontines, lotteries, loans, mining companies, all the 
old contrivances for breathing the national veins, 
were sport to this; even the South Sea bubble 
was the tentative dexterity, the feeble knavery of 
our speculative childhood. The joint-stocks were 
the consummate building, the grand national temple 
to Mammon, the work of our matured skill in bewil- 
dering the moneyed mind, the last labour of the ge- 
nius of overreaching ; another Babel in its erection, 
its fall, and in the dispersion of its builders to every 
corner of the earth where a debtor might escape a 
creditor. 

Yet what can exhaust the elasticity of England ! 
In a year, this catastrophe, which would have left 
the continent loaded with irremoveable ruins, was 
all but forgotten. The ground was cleared. Com- 
merce, like the giant refreshed, was again stretching 
out its hundred hands to grasp the wealth of earth 
and ocean ; discovering new powers and provinces 
iinknown before ; forcing its way through Europe, 
-against adl ihe barriers of our allies, who lepaid us 



1825.] THE REIGN. 343 

for restoring their thrones, by excommunicating our 
trade ; through America, against tariffs, tribunals, 
and the angry recollections of the war ; through In- 
dia, in defiance of the severer hostility of our fellow- 
subjects, the Company; through the ends of the 
earth, against ignorance, jealousy, the savage war- 
fare, and remorseless superstitions of barbarism. 
Such are the miracles wrought by giving the unre- 
stricted use of his faculties to man, — the miracles of 
freedom ! And while England has this noble mono- 
poly in her own hands, she may laugh all others to 
scorn : she holds the key of the world's wealth, who- 
ever may stand at the gate of the treasure-chamber ; 
while she remains the freest of nations, she is sove- 
reign of the talisman by which she can create opu- 
lence and strength at a word ; turn the sands of the 
desert into gold ; and, with a more illustrious necro- 
mancy, invest things as empty as the dust and air, 
with the shape and substance of grandeur and impe- 
rial power. 

Public affairs were now on the eve of a remarkable 
change. Lord Liverpool's ministry had continued 
for twelve years since the peace, without peculiar suc- 
cess or failure ; its fortunes a copy of the man, and 
both stamped with quiet mediocrity. Hissystemwas, 
to glide on from year to year, and think that his bu- 
siness was amply done, if the twelve months passed 
without a rebellion, a war, or a national bankruptcy ; 
to shrink from every improvement, in his terror of 
change; and to tolerate every old abuse, through 
dread of giving the nation a habit of inquiry. This 
evil was less the result of his intention than of his 
nature. 

England owes no higher thanks to his memory, as 
a patron of her arts or a protector of her literature, 
than as her guide to power, or the purifier of her 
constitution. Old Cyril Jackson, when he launched 
him from Oxford to begin the world in parliament^ 
-ivrote to his father> "Your son will never be a 



344 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1827. 

Statesman." And the old man's sagacity was not 
mistaken. His most intimate associate has been 
heard to declare, that Lord Liverpool never read a 
book through since they were together at the uni- 
versity. The proof was given in his criminal ne- 
glect of the encouragement that an English minister 
owes to Uterature, as the first honour and security of 
his country. 

1827. — Early m this year Lord Liverpool was seized 
with a paralytic affection, which disabled him from 
public business.* The premiership had for twelve 
years been a bed of slumber. It now fell into the 
hands of one who made it a bed of feverish anxiety 
and bitter wakefulness — George Canning, the first 
debater, the most dexterous politician, and the hap- 
piest wit of the house ; the most perplexed, imhappy, 
and disappointed of ministers. 

His first step decided all the rest : for it was the 
first step down the precipice. He had called the 
whigs to his side. It must be acknowledged that, 
in this ominous alliance, his " poverty, but not his 
will," was the counsellor. His whole life had been 
amused with laying the lash on opposition ; no 
man had oftener plucked the lion's hide over their 
ears : no man had more regularly converted the so- 
lemn liftings up of their voice into tones that set 
the house on a roar. But his former colleagues 
had deserted him ; and he, unhappily for his fame 
and for his peace, retaliated by deserting his 
principles. In England this never has been done 
with impunity, and, until England is destined to pe- 
rish, never will be done. Canning's spirit sank under 
his difiiculties. His mind had not yet expunged 
away enough of its original honour, to attain that 
base indifference to public opinion which makes the 
tranquillity of the base. The taunts of men incalcu- 

* He lingered, with his faculties decaying, till December, 1828, when 
he died. 



1827.] THE REIGN. 345 

lably his inferiors in intellect, and who were soon to 
display how far they could sink below him in poli- 
tical degradation ; vexed his graceful faculties, ex- 
hausted his sparkling animation ; and, after a brief 
period, clouded by the increasing embarrassments of 
useless allies and insidious adversaries, by painful 
consciousness, and the discovery that he had toiled / 
for a shadow after all, tormented him out of the 
world. 

Thus perished, after a four months' premiership, a 
minister of whom the nation had once formed the 
highest hopes ; the friend of Sheridan, and with no 
slight share of his genius ; the pupil of Pitt, and the 
ablest defender and most chosen depositary of his 
principles ; a man of refined scholarship, the hap- 
piest dexterity of conversation, keen public sagacity, 
and the most vivid, diversified, and pungent oratory 
in the legislature. 

Some suspicions were thrown on Canning's reli- 
gion, from the circumstance, that in his last illness, 
he was not attended by a clergyman. But if this be 
not directly attributable to the rapidity of his disease, 
or the negligence of those round him, we cannot 
suffer ourselves to conceive that Christianity was 
either unknown or unfelt by him who could wiite 
the following epitaph, — one of the most pathetic and 
beautiful in the whole compass of the language. 

"TO THE MEMORY OF 

" George Charles Canning, eldest Son of the Right Hovourable Creorge 
Canning and Joan Scott Ms Wife ; bom ^pril 25, 1801 — died March 
31, 1820. 

" Though short thy span, God's utiimpeach'd decrees, 
Which made that shortcn'd span one long disease, 
-Yet merciful in chastening, gave thee scope 
For mild redeeming virtues, — faith and hope, 
Meek resignation, pious charity ; 
And, since this world was. not the world for thee,", 
Far from thy path removed, with partial care. 
Strife, glory, gain, and pleasure's flowery snare ; 
Bade earth's temptations pass thee harmless by, 
And fix'd on Heaven thine unaverted eye | 



346 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1829. 

" O ! mark'd from birth, and nurtnr'd, for the skies '^ 
In youth, with more than learning's wisdom wise ' 
As sainted martyrs, patient to endure ! 
Simple as unwean'd infancy, and pure I 
Pure from all stain (save that of human clay, 
Which Christ's atoning blood hath washed away)' ^ 

By mortal sufferings now no more oppress'd, 
Mount, sinless spirit, to thy destin'd rest ! 
While I — reversed our nature's kindlier doom — 
Pour forth a father's sorrows on thy tomb." 



CHAPTER XX. 

The Catholic Question, 

********** 
********* * 

The statutes against popery in England and 
Ireland were the restrictions, not of a religious faith, 
but of a political faction ; enacted, not against dis- 
sidents from the church of England, but against 
rebellious partisans of the house of Stuart. The 
question was one, not of the liturgy, but of the sword. 
The Stuarts lost the day. They were exiled ; and 
the soldiers whom they left behind, were disabled by 
the provisions of law from again stirring up rebellion, 
and again shedding the blood of freemen in the cause 
of tyrants and slaves. 

But the decline of the exiled dynasty no sooner 
made the relaxation of those penalties in any degree 
safe, than they were relaxed. The oath of alle- 
giance,* leases for 999 years,t the full purchase of 
landed property, the extinction of all disabilities 
relative to education, the unrestrained public exer- 
cise of iheir religious rites and tenets ;J elevated 

* 13th and 14th Geo. m., cap. 35. 

1 17th and 18th Geo. III., cap. 49. J By the act of 1782. 



1829.] THE CATHOLIC QUESTION. 347 

the sons of that soldiery, from the condition na- 
tural to a defeated army, to a rank of privilege never 
possessed by Protestants under a popish government. 
The question was then laid aside. It slept from 1782 
to 1792, — ten years of peace and singular prosperity 
in Ireland. 

But in 1789 France began to disturb the world. 
The manufacturing districts in the north of Ireland, 
much connected with America by trade and indivi- 
dual intercourse, rapidly adopted the idea of emu- 
lating the American revolt, while England was in the 
first perplexities of an approaching war. The 
Presbyterian of the north scorned the Roman Catho- 
lic of the south ; and would have disdained the re- 
public which was to be buttressed by the popish 
altar. But all that could embarrass government must 
be tried. Some millions of peasantry in tumult 
would form an important diversion ; and the agents 
of a faction that owned neither a king nor a God, 
were sent out to tell the Roman Catholic that he was 
excluded from the favour of his king, and restricted 
in the exercise of his religion. 

The topic which was adopted by the Presbyterian 
republican to embarrass the English cabinet, was 
adopted, of course, by the whigs in the Irish parlia- 
ment to embarrass the Irish minister. From Ire- 
land it was transmitted for the use of opposition in 
England. 

The purpose in these pages is not to discuss the 
point of theology, but to give a glance at the progress 
of the question. After years of contest, it was 
brought into the cabinet by Canning. In his reluc- 
tant exile from office, he had taken it as the common 
burden of opposition, and he bore it back with him. 
It now formed the endless taunt of his late col- 
leagues. " Will you repeal the Test Act, and over- 
throw the estabhshment ? Will you bring in Ca- 
tholics to legislate for Protestants, and overthrow 
the Constitution ?" was the perpetual outcry of the 



348 GEORGE THE FOrRTH. [1829 

champion, Mr. Peel, across the house, echoed by the 
congenial virtue of Mr. Dawson, and their retainers, 
and chiefly by the Duke of Wellington, who " could 
not comprehend the possibility of placing Roman 
Catholics in a Protestant legislature with any kind 
of safety, and whose personal knowledge told him, 
that no king, however Catholic, could govern his 
Catholic subjects without the aid of the pope.' 
Canning left the question as Fox had left it. Lor 
Goderich's short-lived ministry ran in and out of 
the cabinet with too breathless haste to decide 
on any thing. It perished of a fracas between 
two treasury officials, and expired on the road to 
Windsor. 

In 1828 the Duke of Wellington became prime 
minister. The empire, weary of the futile genera- 
tion that had just dropped out of power, rejoiced at 
the accession of a man distinguished in the public 
service, bound to the national interests by the most 
munificent rewards, and pledged in the most solemn 
and voluntary manner to resist the demands of 
popery. But his first steps taught the nation the 
hazards of premature applause. The formation of 
his cabinet was assailed, in parliament, under every 
shape of ridicule. The merits of his colleagues were 
loudly declared to be all summed up in the words 
mediocrity and submission. The ministers were 
called clerks, and the cabinet — a " bureau adjoining 
the Horse Guards." It must be owned that the 
premier's antipathies did not fall chiefly on indivi- 
duals trained by the habits of their lives to unqvestion- 
ing obedience. To the astonishment of England, 
her civil offices were filled with soldiers ! the minis- 
ter's quarter-master-general governed the colonies; 
his aid-de-camp governed the civil department of the 
army; his subordinates in the field were the admi- 
nistrators of employments so important to constitu- 
tional security, that they had never befoi e gone out 
of civil hands. But if the principle of subimssioa 



1829.] THE CATHOLIC QUESTION. 349 

be essential to public happiness, the cabinet, the 
quarter-master, the aid-de-camp, the whole array of 
this martial government, lived on the breath of the 
premier's nostrils ; and they have justified the saga- 
city of the theory by the most unmurmuring acquies- 
cence in the memory of man 

So great a power has not been in the hands of any 
English subject since Wolsey, but one — and that one 
was Cromwell! 

For purposes still undeveloped, it became the de- 
termination of this formidable depositary of public 
wisdom, to admit Roman Catholics into the legisla- 
ture. — Tiie first step was, to repeal the Test Act, a 
barrier erected by the founders of the constitution. 
It was left to whig hands, the fittest for the work of 
constitutional overthrow ; and the honour of pulling 
it down was given to a descendant of that Russell 
who had cemented the establishment with his 
blood . 

The Test Act might have been obsolete; the 
dissenters might have suddenly become lovers of the 
establishment ; the establishment might have sud- 
denly acquired some new principle of immortality ; 
yet the eagerness of Episcopal assent given to its 
overthrow, showed that some of the English prelacy 
had more confidence in the minister than knowledge 
of human nature. Other clerics, of less exalted rank, 
but less confiding, saw, in the very suggestion of 
this repeal, a summons to the consecrated guardians 
of Protestantism, to collect their scattered strength, 
to abandon their habitual dependence on politicians, 
and to show that the highest trust which can be re- 
posed in earthly hands, was not to be sacrificed to a 
fond security in the promises of office. — The repeal 
was passed, and the darkest prediction was instantly 
verified. It was found to be a direct preliminary to 
that measure, which its own chief abettor pronounced 
" a breach of the constitution." 

Yet if the nature of the repeal escaped English 
Gg 



350 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1829, 

simplicity, it was deeply comprehended by Irish 
faction. Public meetings, assemblages in the Ro- 
mish chapels, proclamations to mobs, spoke trum- 
pet-tongued in Ireland. But to the universal as- 
tonishment, the vigour of the English ministry had 
suddenly assumed the attitude of majestic repose. 
The quick, vindictive vigilance of a cabinet of sol- 
diership had softened into the unruffled calmness of 
the gods of Epicurus, — all was tranquillity. 

The Irish papers came filled with statements of 
the most furious harangues, processions, and meet- 
ings, daylight musterings, and midnight contlagra- 
tions. The minister was asked hourly in parliament, 
" Have those things reached your ears 1 A parlia- 
ment is open in the Irish capital denouncing England 
in the most traitorous language. Will you suffer it 
to remain open 1 An individual of notorious popu- 
lar influence is making regular progresses through 
the country, distributing an order of knighthood of 
his own creation, with the colour of rebellion, and 
mottoes telling the people that he who would be 
free must himself strike the blow. Would this be 
endured in England 1 If a demagogue collect a mob 
in Manchester, the law has power to seize him. 
Does the passage of the Irish channel mutilate 
the law V 

On the 5th of February, 1829, a day which will be 
long recorded in the evil calendar of England and of 
Europe, the king's speech, delivered by commission, 
declared that the time was come for the entrance of 
the Roman Catholics into the Protestant legislature ! 
The public indignation was boundless. It recapitu- 
lated the solemn denials that had been given in every 
form to the suspicion that such a measure was 
intended. It recalled the unequivocal pledges that 
every leading member of the cabinet had personally 
given to the integrity of the Protestant constitution. 
It pointed to the express words from year to year, 
in which they had founded their resistance to the 



1829. J THE CATHOLIC QUESTION. 351 

popish demands, on the principles of popery ; not on 
temporary considerations, but on the essential nature 
of the rehgion. And no member of the cabinet had 
spoken more unequivocally on the principles of po- 
pery than the Duke of Wellington. 

In the debate on the Marquis of Lansdowne's 
motion, he had said : — " The question is one merely 
of expediency, and I ground my opposition, not 
on any doctrinal points, but on the church govern- 
ment of the Catholics. Nobody can have looked 
at the transactions in Ireland for the last 150 years, 
without at the same time seeing, that the Roman 
Catholic church has acted on the principle of com- 
bination, and that this combination has been the in- 
strument by which all the evil that has been done has 
been effected ! We are told that whatever may be 
the cause of the present evils in Ireland, Catholic 
emancipation is the remedy. My lords, I am afraid, 
that if, in addition to Catholic emancipation, we were 
to give up to the Roman Catholics of Ireland the 
church establishment in Ireland, we should not have 
found a remedy for the evil produced by this combi- 
nation; unless we could find the means of connecting 
the Roman Catholic church with the government of 
the country. But, my lords, we are told there are 
securities. I beg leave to remind the noble marquis, 
and the noble and learned lord on the cross bench 
(Plunket), of a fact which they cannot deny, that the 
Catholics themselves have all along objected to secu- 
rities. He cannot, therefore, be surprised, that we 
who feel strongly on the subject should wish to feel 
secure as to the safety of the church and state, before 
we venture on such an experiment as this. 

" My lords, I am very much afraid that the Roman 
Catholic religion, in its natural state, is not very 
favourable to civil government in any part of Europe. 
And I must beg your lordships to observe, that in all 
the countries of Europe, the sovereigns have, at dif- 
ferent periods, found it necessary, as was stated by 



332 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1829. 

my noble and learned friend (Lord Colchester) to- 
night, to call upon the people to assist them in the 
govermnetiL of their people /" 

On this speech no comment can be necessary. 
Next comes the immaculate sincerity of Mr. Peel ; 
his whole and sole reason for refusing to join the 
Canning ministry being his horror of the imputa- 
tion of taking any share in carrying the Catholic 
question ! 

" For a space of eighteen years,^'' said this ingenu- 
ous and honest personage, "I have followed one 
undeviating course of conduct, offering, during the 
whole of that time, an uncompromising, but a tempe- 
rate, a fair, and, as 1 believe, a constitutional resistance 
to the making any further concessions to the Roman 
Catholics ! The opinions which I held during that 
time I still hold ; and I thought from having always 
avowed these opinions, but, above all, from having 
while in office taken an active and, I may perhaps 
say, an impoiftant part against the claims of Catholics, 
that I could not remain in office, after events ren- 
dered it probable that I should be the single minister 
of the crown who was likely to continue opposed to 
themV— {Speech, \S21.) 

But, on Canning's introduction of the question into 
the house, he stated his principles of resistance. 
The document might figure in the history of Bubb 
Doddington; to some future Le Sage it will be 
invaluable. 

The Right Honourable Robert Peel said: — "Mr. 
Pitt has been charged with supporting the Catholic 
claims; but what were his words in 1805? After 
saying ' that he would not, under any circumstances, 
nor any possible situation of affairs, consent that it 
should be discussed or entertained as a question of 
right,' that minister had proceeded — ' I, sir, have 
never been one of those who have held that the term 
emancipation is, in the smallest degree, applicable 
to the repeal of the few remaining penal statutes to 



1829.] THE CATHOLIC QUESTION. 353 

which the Catholics are liable. I cannot shut my 
eyes to the fact, that the Roman Catholic must be 
anxious to advance his religion.' Those were Mr. 
Pitt's principles ; and it was on those grounds that he 
(Mr. Peel) had always opposed what was termed 
Catholic emancipation. 

" Could any man, acqu-ainted with the state of 
the world, doubt for a moment, that there was 
engrafted on the Catholic religion something more 
than a scheme for promoting mere religion ? That 
there was in view the furtherance of a means 
by which m.an could acquire authority over man ? 
Could he know what the doctrine of absolution, of 
confession, of indulgences, was, without a suspicion 
that those doctrines were maintained for the purpose 
of establishing the power of man over the minds 
and hearts of men? What was it to him what 
the source of the power was called, if practically it 
was suchl 

"He held in his hand a proclamation, or bull, 
addressed by Pope Pius VII., in 1807, to the Irish 
Catholics, granting an indulgence of three hundred 
days from the pains of purgatory to those who should 
devoutly recite, at stated times, three short ejacu- 
lations, of which the first was—' Jesus ! Maria ! 
Joseph ! I offer to you my ardent heart !' When 
he saw such a mockery of all religion as this resorted 
to, to prop up the authority of man over man ; when 
he saw such absurdity as this addressed to rational 
Catholics, and received by rational Catholics, and pub- 
lished among a superstitious and illiterate populace, 
it was in vain to tell him that such things could be in- 
effective. 

" He thought it right to retain all the existing dis- 
abilities, as far as related to admitting Catholics to the 
legislature and to offices of state. He had felt that 
he had no choice, but to state with firmness, though, 
he trusted, without asperity, the principles which his 
reason dictated, and which his honour and conscience 
Gg2 



354 GEOKGE THE FOITRTH. [1829. 

compelled him to maintain ! He had never adopted 
his opinions upon it, either from deference to high 
station, or that which might he more fairly expected 
to impress him, high ability. It was a matter of con- 
solation to him, that he had now an opportunity of 
showing his adherence to those tenets which he liad for- 
merly espoused ; that, if his opinions were unpopular, 
he stood by them still, when the influence and authority 
that might have given them currency were gone ; and 
when It was impossible, he believed, that in the mind 
of any human being, he could stand suspected of 
pursuing his prindples with any view to favour or 
personal aggrandizement !" — (Speech, 1837.) 

Copley (Lord Lyndhurst) declared, that " The ques- 
tion was not now as to the prevalence of the Roman 
Catholic religion, but it was this — Whether Protest' 
antism was to be continued in Ireland. And the per- 
son took a very narrow view oi the subject, who could 
entertain a doubt on the points — {Speech, 1827.) 

Mr. Goulburn, who had been secretary in Ireland, 
and been sent there, from his peculiar Protestantism, 
to balance any possible irregularities in the lord 
lieutenant's theology, declared, " That he had never 
attempted to conceal from himself the state of Ire- 
land. But he differed totally from those honourable 
gentlemen who fondly imagined that Catholic eman- 
cipation could be productive of results so beneficial 
as to remove its distresses. Believing, as he did, that 
the dangers of Catholic emancipation would be 
greater than its benefits, he felt himself called on to 
give it his decided negatived — {Speech, 1827.) 

Mr. George Dawson declared, " That he should 
not labour to prove that the admission of the Roman 
Catholics to the privileges of parliament was con- 
trary to the whole spirit of the constitution! The 
Roman Catholic priesthood, who exercised over their 
flocks such unbounded sway, were a body of men 
assuming and wielding political power, greater than 
the legislature itself. And it was to add to and con- 



1829.] THE CATHOLIC QUESTION. 355 

solidate that power, that the honourable baronet 
(Burdett) had just called on the house. 

" The Catholic religion remained unchanged; and 
so long as it should continue unchanged, so long 
would it he necessary to oppose the claims of the 
Catholics."— (»^eec/i, 1827.) 

Each individual of those, and their fellow-officials, 
who all pledged themselves with equal distinctness, 
had founded his declarations, not upon circumstances, 
which might change, but upon the nature of the 
Romish church, which scorns the idea of change. 
Yet, with the interval of scarcely more than a single 
session, all those men faced about, as if at the tap of 
the drum, and delivered their convictions yor the 
measure, against which they had declared those con- 
victions unalterable. 

The converts ! were instantly taunted in the strong- 
est language of national scorn. The most contempt- 
uous phrases that human disdain could invent were 
heaped upon them. The brand w^as burned on them to 
the bone. But by what sullen influence, or with what 
ultimate purpose, this unaccountable change was 
wrought, must be left to that investigation which sits 
upon the tomb, and declares the infinite emptiness of 
the amplest reward for which a public man barters 
the respect of his country. 

\ et, one of the most painful features of the entire 
traiisaction was the scandal of an individual whose 
sacred office ought to have secured him from so deep 
a fall. On the night of the final debate, in which 
the primates of England and Ireland declared their 
strongest abhorrence of the ministerial measure, 
Lloyd, bishop of Oxford, who had voted against it in 
the preceding session, put himself forward as its de- 
fender. The chief part of his speech was the ram- 
bling declamation which was familiar to the house. 
But he had a novelty in reserve. " I have heard it 
charged against noble lords," said this miserable 
man, " that they are introducing men into the house 



356 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1829 

whose religion they have already sworn to be idola- 
trous. Now, I acknowledge that I have taken that 
oath. I have sworn that the invocation of saints 
and the sacrifice of the mass are idolatry; but I 
have not sworn that all papists are guilty of idola- 
try. Some of their actions may be idolatrous, and 
«ome, in my solemn judgment, have a tendency to 
dolatry itself. But if they are not wilfully and in- 
tentionciily guilty of idolatry, they are not, in my 
opinion, guilty of idolatry before God." 

Even the house listened with astonishment to this 
monstrous doctrine. On this principle, crime must 
depend altogether on the name. If the murderer 
can but persuade himself that he stabs for the public 
or for the priest, he is a murderer no longer. The 
crime is not in the breach of the law of man, nor in 
the insult to the law of God, but in the fancy of the 
criminal. This was the true Romish principle, on 
which the slaughter of heretics is still justified ; the 
deed is done, not for bloodshed, but for saintship ; not 
to kill the body, but to save the soul ; and thus is 
massacre a virtue ! The Israelite, dancing round the 
golden calf, should have known this argument, and 
proved that Moses was a persecutor. The Athenian 
idolater should have learned in the school of the 
Oxford professor, and beaten St. Paul out of the 
field. Both had only to say, that in worshipping 
idols, in praying to them, offering incense, and ex- 
pecting the cure of diseases and the remission of 
sins from them, they did not intend to commit idola- 
try, — and they were idolaters no more. 

The public received the announcement of this 
theory of crime with the bitterest reprobation. The 
logician despised the shallowness of the sophist. — 
The cleric shrank from the doctrine of the divine. 
Its utterer was undone. He was compared to Par- 
ker, the basest of apostates, also bishop of Oxford. 
The public journals tore up his doctrine and his 
character together. No man can long resist this 



1829.] THE CATHOLIC QUESTION. 357 

Storm, unless he find strength within. The wretched 
prelate made no defence : he shrank from the inflic- 
tion ; and in a single month from the time of his fata] 
speech, the defender of idplatry was in his grave. 

Yet this was the man who could thus describe 
Irish popery, and in the very same speech. Nothing 
can be more true or more formidable than the descrip- 
tion. 

" The dangers of the church of Ireland come not 
from within, but from without. She is brought into 
competition with a rival church — a church neither 
missionary nor established, but pretending to' be 
established, in a country in which there is already a 
church established by law ; this church having at its 
head two-and-twenty bishops, nominally appointed 
by the pope, but really, at least in general, elected 
by themselves — bishops connected together not only 
by the ties of their peculiar religion, but by the bands 
which unite the fellows of a college — having under 
them, as it is stated, a body of three thousand five 
hundred clergy, plac6d beyond the pale and protec- 
tion of the law, in their spiritual relation ; and in n9 
way responsible to the law ! — men entirely under the 
control and superintendence of the bishops, remova- 
ble at will, having no appeal to the king's courts, in 
case of a suspension ecclesiastically irregular ; and, 
in truth, in every point submitted to the arbitrary 
authority of the bishops ; — these clergy again exer- 
cising over their flocks the most unlimited influence, 
the most undisputed sway ; and doing this chiefly by 
the tenets of their religion, which places the consciences 
of their votaries altogether at their disposal P^ — 
{Speech on the Relief Bill, April 2, 1829.) 

The measure was carried by a majority of 105 ! in 
the lords, where it had been always thrown out with 
disdain. The whole people petitioned in vain. The 
London petition alone was signed by upwards of a 
hundred thousand householders. Thousands and hun- 
dreds of thousands of the gentry and professional 



358 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1829 

classes of England sent up the strongest remon- 
strances to the legislature. Still the measure was 
urged on; it was voted through; all entreaties for 
time to take the public sense on a question which 
touched the birthright of every freeman of England 
were refused. " Come to the vote" was the dictato- 
rial language of those who knew that whatever they 
might want in argument they made up in numbers. 
The measure was haughtily carried, and Roman 
Catholics were made members of that legislature 
which, by their religious tenets, they pronounce to be 
impious and heretical; governors of that people 
which they pronounce to be incapable of salvation ; 
arbiters of that civil and religious freedom which it 
is the first principle of popery lo extinguish in all 
kingdoms ; and counsellors of that king whom Rome 
denounces as a revolter from its fealty and its religion. 
But if the measure had been the quintessence of 
public good, it would have been scandalized by the 
nature of its origin. No man could be found to ac- 
knowledge its parentage then ; it is cast fatherless 
on the world even now. Instead of the openness 
which ought to have eminently distinguished a ques- 
tion, affecting not a party, but an empire, — not a ses- 
sion, but the last hour at which England may boast 
of a parliament, — all was mystery. Its councils were 
all carried on in whispers. As the time approached, 
the secrecy grew more mystical ; the curtains were 
drawn closer round the cabinet ; the chief justice who 
drew the bill, after the task had been indignantly 
refused by the attorney-general. Sir Charles Wether 
ell, was merged in a darkness so profound, that it 
has never left him since. The master of the mint's 
right hand did not know what his left was doing. 
The chancellor of the exchequer made sermons, or 
speeches like sermons, of triple the usual length and 
sanctity. The home secretary itinerated the country, 
with a smile and a speech for every village, and 
panegyrized steam engines and the constitution. 



1829.] THE CATHOLIC QUESTION. 369 

The premier himself was so unconscious of what 
was passing, that he wrote the following billet, evi- 
dently as a matter of familiar intercourse, to an 
Irish friend, who had expressed some curiosity to 
know the news of London: — 

" My dear Sir, — I have received your letter of the 
4th instant; and I assure you, you do me justice in 
believing that I am sincerely anxious to witness the 
settlement of the Roman Catholic question, which, 
by benefiting the state, would confer a benefit on 
every individual belonging to it. 

"But I confess / see no prospect of such a settle- 
ment. Party has been mixed up with the considera- 
tion of the question to such a degree, and such vio- 
lence pervades every discussion of it, that it is im- 
possible to expect to prevail on men to consider it dis- 
passionately. 

" If we could bury it in oblivion for a short time 

and employ that time diligently in the consideration 

of its difficulties on all sides (for they are very great), 

I should not despair of seeing a satisfactory remedy. 

" Believe me, my dear Sir, 

" WELLINGTON. 

'' London, Dec. 11. 1822" 

This letter was addressed to Dr. Curtis, the head 
of the Irish Roman Catholic priesthood : and, trans- 
mitted to such hands, it of course came instantly 
before the public. The Irish laughed at the style, 
and said that in " burying matters in oblivion for a 
time" and " employing the same time in considering 
them," they recognised their countryman. But the 
English, who overlook those things in a military pre- 
mier, universally regarded the billet as precisely of 
the same class with those which the whigs had writ- 
ten whenever they had a hope of power ; the, easy, 
official form of getting rid of the claimants alto- 
gether. 



• 



360 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1829. 

In six weeks from the date of this unsuspecting let- 
ter, the measure was proclaimed with all pomp and 
. ceremonial in the king's speech ! So brief is obli- 
vion, and so blind is sagacity. 

But the people had a sagacity of their own, that 
saw further than the simple optics of the cabinet. 
In the midst of the minister's prospects of eternal 
conciliation, of amity treading on perpetual flowers, 
and national friendship taming down the wild pas- 
sions and rugged jealousies of the people, like an 
other Cybele, scattering oil and wine from a chariot 
drawn by lions ; while the home secretary revelled 
in poetic raptures, and even the premier relaxed the 
rigidity of the ministerial brow ; while Scylla 

" Chid her barking waves into attention, 
And fell Charj'bdis murmured soft applause ;" 

the people declared that the evil day had been only 
precipitated ; that the Irish demagogues, instead of 
receiving the measure as a pledge of peace, would 
turn it into an immediate instrument of turbulence ; 
that they would see nothing in it but a proof that 
clamour, aggression, and intimidation were the true 
weapons for their cause, and that the more they 
asked, and the more insolently they asked it, the 
surer they were to succeed. Ministers were told — 
*' Popery never required any thing but power, and 
never made any other use of it than to perplex and 
crush the Protestant. If you give that power; if 
you send the Roman Catholic back to Ireland, not 
the petitioner that he came, but the conqueror, 
clothed in the spoils of the constitution ; if you put 
the cup into his hand, out of which the first drop 
thrown on the ashes of rebellion will blaze up into 
inextinguishable flame ; you will have to thank only 
yourselves for the deepest hazards that ever tried the 
empire." 
The prediction was scoffed at ; and now, within 



1829.] THE CATHOLIC QUESTION. 361 

a twelvemonth, we have a demand for " the repeal 
of the Union," which would end in a separation of 
the countries, a summons openly issued for a popish 
parliament, and the proposed organization of a na- 
tional army on the model of the volunteers of 1782 ! 
We have a startled proclamation of the Irish lord- 
lieutenant, declaring that designs dangerous to the 
public peace are on foot, and threatening the ven- 
geance of the law on this " conciliated" people. We 
nave an answering proclamation from the Catholic 
" agitators," declaring that the Irish government 
thinks itseU justified in trampling on the people ; that 
" the want of a domestic and national legislature in 
Ireland will find means to make itself known ! and that 
those means will be irresistible /" So much for mili- 
tary legislation ! 

The whole of Europe looked with the keenest anx- 
iety to the discussion of the Catholic question ; and 
its continental results are felt already. All the 
minor Protestant states, which relied on England as 
their protectress, were alarmed by finding that her 
legislature had changed its character. All the po- 
pish states triumphantly regarded the measure as an 
approach to their system. But the example of a 
parliament submissive to the extent of " breaking in 
upon the free constitution," of which the empire had 
boasted for one hundred and thirty years, chiefly 
caught the tastes of the French king, who instantly 
resolved upon making the experiment of a submissive 
parliament, — finding the old one stubborn, cashiered 
it, — to procure a new one for his purpose, would have 
cashiered the constitution, — was defeated in the at- 
tempt, — and has now bequeathed the tremendous evi- 
dence of popular strength to the partisans of revolu- 
tion throughout the woild. And those are but the 
first results of the " great healing measure" of Ca- 
tholic Emancipation! 



Hh 



352 GEORGE THE FOtJRTH. [1829. 

[The advocates of Catholic emancipation stood on 
the broad basis of the rights of man — they insisted 
on the miiversally acknovvledg-ed principle, "that 
among' the natural rights which man retains are all 
the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind: conse- 
quently religion is one of those rights." Every man, 
when he applies his judgment to the religion of his 
neighbour, is conscientiously bound to allow that his 
adoption of it was the act of a free agent ; and whether 
it agree with or differ from that which has received 
the civil sanction of the State, he is only warranted 
and justified in concluding that by adopting it, he has 
exercised that liberty of conscience which supersedes 
all power and control of the civil magistrate. Es- 
seniially wnjust^ then, is every civil or temporal law 
which persecutes man for his religious persuasion, by 
pretending to annul or abridge his liberty of conscience. 

How the measure of Catholic emancipation could 
have been resisted, or even retarded, by good and 
enlightened men, acknowledging the truth and the 
finess of this principle, cannot be easily explained. 
That the spirit of temporizing has long hovered over 
this measure, must be admitted. By reflecting on 
the influence of this spirit, Ave may, in some measure, 
account for the apathy of some and the antipathies 
of many of the statesmen who afterward became the 
most active and distinguished friends of the Catholics. 
We see it generally as an involuntary affection of 
the mind, produced by some cause which has first 
subdued or rendered it for the time incapable of its 
freedom of deliberation, and deprived it of its wonted 
energy and vigour in action. Various are the causes 
which operate this effect — pride, joy, success, and 
prosperity, the intrigues, flattery, and seduction of 
others, the weakness, blindness and perverseness of 
ourselves. It is not the isolated affection of one hu- 
man being, but the gregarious quality of a whole so- 
ciety. To prevent it absolutely at all times, is a 
moral impossibility ; to check it at any time, is a mat- 



1829.J THE CATHOLIC QUESTION. 363 

ter of extreme difficulty ; to correct it before disas- 
ter works the cure, is the most honourable though 
unthankful office of the lover of his country. That 
this spirit militates against discussion and investiga- 
tion, is self-evident. The struggling efforts of truth 
are often overpowered by this impetuous torrent — 
her voice is drowned, and her very being is borne 
away, undistinguished from the angry and turbid 
stream. No wonder, then, that the progress of the 
Catholic cause was slow ; the wonder is, how it could 
have made any advances. It was opposed with en- 
ergy and earnestness. This opposition created cor- 
respondent feelings in its advocates, until ai length 
they rescued it from the darkness with which bigotry 
and ignorance covered it, and restored to the Catho- 
lics those rights, of which it is now universally ad- 
mitted they had been cruelly and unjustly deprived. 

The opponents of the Catholic claims urged their 
rejection on the plea that the constitution of Great 
Britain was a Protestant constitution. To this it was 
answered, that it was originally Catholic ; that it was 
founded by Catholics; that the great laws to which 
the people owed their liberty were the work of 
Catholics ; that at the time of the Revolution no 
change was made in the constitution, and that then 
nothing was done beyond making a declaration of 
right, because they could not go farther than the 
Catholics had gone ; that the bill of rights was a de- 
claratory law ; it was declaratory of the rights ob- 
tained by our Catholic ancestors. Hence it was con- 
cluded, that the Protestants had no exclusive right 
laid down, and that they have no exclusive right to 
the constitution. 

The charge of moral atrocity was also met by the 
declarations of the Catholic prelates, who stated that 
it was not the doctrine of the Catholic church to sup- 
port or obey any foreign temporal power, and that to 
break faith with heretics was no part of their creed. 
It was also urged, on the side of the Catholics, that 



364 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1829. 

the charge of moral atrocity could not be sustained 
against them without libelling the Christian religion : 
monstrous crimes are incompatible with the Christian 
religion which they profess, and the argument of 
moral atrocity would not make against the Catholic 
religion alone, but against Christianity in general. 
The reasoning went to this, that the religion of Christ- 
endom was an abomination ; and if an abomination, 
they were emphatically asked why they tolerated it. 

From the charge of moral atrocity the opponents 
of the Catholics passed to the assertion, that their 
emancipation would be incompatible with the safety 
of England. The plain meaning of this is, that no 
man could be a good British subject unless he be- 
longed to the established church. In answer, it was 
shown that the Irish Parliament declared that the 
Catholics were good subjects. In 1791, they stated 
that it was necessary for the security of the country 
to give them a share of political power. That par- 
liament gave them the privilege of holding landed 
property, and put arms in their hands. It was enacted, 
" that it shall and may be lawful for papists, or per- 
sons professing the Popish religion, to hold, exercise, 
and enjoy all civil and military offices, or places of 
trust and profit under his Majesty." 

The history of Ireland has been appealed to as 
furnishing strong arguments in favour of the oppo- 
nents of this question. To this it was replied, that 
the historian in the case of Ireland is, generally 
speaking, peculiarly bad authority. He wrote to 
gratify power, and he flattered it ; his own private 
advantage absorbed all his thoughts, and his contem- 
plation only dwelt on that which might be turned to 
his own account, or that of his employers. They 
were called on to state the case of Ireland fairly, and 
not to fly back to barbarous times and long exploded 
principles ; to state her transactions since she became 
a nation, not to go back to senseless follies ; not to 
say, on this spot such a crime was committed, on 



1830.] TBE CATHOLIC Q;UESTI«N. 365 

this spot such a chieftain raised his rebellious stand- 
ard. They were called on to come at once to the 
point, and say, here a Catholic regiment held its 
ground, and nobly shared the dangers of that battle 
the laurels of which it was not destined to share. — 
These arguments prevailed, and Irishmen can now 
fight the battles of their country, fr^e as they are 
brave.' — American Publishers.] 



1830. — The life of George the Fourth was now 
hastening to its close. He had lost his brother, the 
Duke of York,* to whom he had been peculiarly at- 
tached, and whose death was sincerely mourned by 
both king and people. For some years his majesty 
had been affected by complaints which must have 
imbittered even royal enjoyments. He had frequent 
returns of the gout, and it was subsequently ascer- 
tained that the valves of the heart were partially os- 
sified ; yet a remarka±»le strength of constitution sus- 
tained him : to the last, his manners were courtly, 
his conversation was animated, and his recollection 
of persons and circumstances singularly quick and 
interesting. But the severe winter of 1829, by de- 
priving him of exercise in the open air, disposed him 
to dropsical symptoms. He resided in the Lodge at 
Windsor, a retreat too dreary for an invalid. Slight 
fits of an indisposition were rumoured, from the be- 
ginning of the year ; but on the 15th of April a 
bulletin was issued, stating that he suffered under 
a bilious attack, accompanied by embarrassment in 
his breathing. He partially recovered, and transacted 
public business ; in which, however, from feebleness, 
he was obliged to delegate the sign-manual to com- 
missioners. But, for nearly a month before his 
death, his majesty was aware of his situation ; and, 
though not without hopes of life, he felt the ne- 
cessity of preparing for the ^eat change. About the 

♦ 5th January, 1827. 
Hh2 



366 GEORGE THE FOURTH. [1830. 

middle of June his physicians were said to have in- 
timated that medicine could do no more ; an an- 
nouncement which he received with manly and deco- 
rous resignation, uttering the words, " God's will be 
done !" 

On the 24th of June his majesty became still more 
exhausted, and remained chiefly in a kind of slumber 
for the next forty-eight hours. On the 26th, at three 
in the morning, the attendant was startled by his 
suddenly rising from his bed, and expressing some 
inward pain; a fit of coughing came on while he 
was in his physician's arms ; he ejaculated, " Oh 
God ! I am dying ;" in a few seconds after, he said, 
" This is death ;" and, at a quarter past three, ex- 
pired. 



The details which have been already given of his 
majesty's life prevent the necessity of making any 
immediate remarks on his character. Some state- 
ments of those early errors into which he was drawn 
by the strong temptations that beset a prince, and 
some traits of the individuals who rendered them 
selves disgracefully conspicuous by administering t@ 
those errors, have been intentionally omitted. Their 
insertion here would be repulsive to the feelings of 
the writer, and of no advantage to the reader. 

The progress of the arts, of which his majesty 
was a liberal patron, — the improvements of London, 
chiefly due to his taste, — and the general intellectual 
progress of the empire during his reign, — all topics of 
interest, are necessarily restricted by the limits of the 
volume. 

As to the personal opinions delivered in these 
pages, the writer has had no object in them but 
truth; and, not feeling disposed to turn away from 
its avowal, nor to stoop to the arts by which dupli- 
city thrives, he has told the truth with the plainness 
that becomes a subject of England. To any remarks 



1830.] CONCLUDING REMARKS. 367 

that may be made on such plainness from one of his 
profession, he gives the unanswerable reply — that it 
is his profession which ought to take the lead in all 
truth ; that if it have ever suffered its brow to be 
humbled by honours ignobly won, or its free limbs 
to be entangled in tlie cloak of the hireling, it owes 
a duty to itself to show that this baseness is against 
its nature ; it owes a duty to its holy religion to show 
that a churchman may be in earnest, when, with the 
Scriptures in his hand, he declares, that there are 
higher objects for the immortal spirit than the mixed 
and vulgar temptations of our corrupted state of 
society; and that, "being content with food and 
raiment," the Christian should leave personal and 
public meanness to their reward; shrink from the 
degrading elevation, which is to be gained only by 
leaving conscience behind ; and seek no honours but 
those which are alike above human passion and 
human change. 



APPENDIX. 



A CONSIDERABLE number of anecdotes of his late Majesty 
have appeared in the newspapers, the principal of which 
will be found here. Their employment in the " Memoir" 
would have been unsuitable from their miscellaneous nature, 
and their having been too much before the public for a 
claim to novelty. However, they throw light on character, 
and as such are worth retaining. 



ANECDOTES, &c. 

From the moment of the prince's birth, he became an 
object of the strongest national interest. He was a remark- 
ably fine infant ; and his birth and the queen's safety so 
much delighted the king (George the Third), that he spon- 
taneously presented 500Z. to the messenger who brought him 
the glad tidings. A scene of universal joy ensued. Every 
town in England had its gala, and every village its bonfire. 

The ladies who called at the palace were admitted into 
the queen's bedroom to see the child, about forty at a time ; 
the part containing the bed being screened off by a sort of 
lattice-work. The royal infant lay in a most splendid 
cradle of velvet and Brussels lace, adorned with gold ; while 
two young ladies of the court, in virgin white, stood to rock 
the cradle, and the nurse at its head sat with a crimson 
velvet cushion, occasionally to receive the child and present 
it to its mother. The cradle was placed on a small eleva- 
tion under a canopy of state. The head and the sides, 
which came no higher than the bed, were covered with 
crimson velvet, and lined with white satin. From the head 
rose an ornament of carved work, gilt, with the coronet in 
the middle. The upper sheet was covered with very broad, 
beautiful Brussels lace, turning over the top upon a magni- 



370 GEORGE THE FOTTRTH. 

ficent quilt of crimson velvet and gold lace; the \vhoIe 
length of the Brussels lace appearing also along the sides, 
and hanging down from underneath. v 



The children were reared in the homely English manner 
most conducive to health. The account of a visiter was : — 
*' The royal children rise early, generally at six, breakfast 
at eight, live on the simplest food, and are much in the open 
air. I have been several evenings in the queen's lodge with 
no other company than the family. They sit round a large 
table, on which are books, work, pencils, and paper. While 
the younger part of the family are drawing and working, 
the beautiful babe Amelia is sometimes in the lap of one of 
her sisters, and sometimes playing with the king on the 
carpet." " All the princesses and princes had a commerce 
table." " I seldom miss going to early prayers at the king's 
chapel, at eight o'clock, where I never fail of seeing their 
majesties and all the royal family." " In the evening every 
one is employed with pencil, needle, or knitting ; between 
the pieces of music the conversation is easy and pleasant, 
and the king plays at backgammon with one of his equer- 
ries." *' Their majesties rise at six, and enjoy the two suc- 
ceeding hoars, which they call their own; at eight, the 
Prince of Wales, the Bishop of Osnaburgh, &c. are brought 
from their several houses to Kew, to breakfast with their 
parents. At nine, the younger children are brought in; 
and while the five elder are closely applying to their books, 
the little ones pass the whole morning in Richmond gardens. 
The king and queen frequently sit in the room while the 
children dine, and in the evening all the children again pay 
their duty at Kew House before they retire to bed." 



About 1769, party fury raged throughout the land, and 
the queen wished to conciliate the pubhc mind by exhibit- 
ing the endearments of domestic life. The jvLven^e fetes at 
the palace were numerous ; and the infant Prince of Wales 
(seven years old) was always dressed in scarlet and gold, 
with the insignia of the Garter ; while the Duke of York 



APPENDIX. 371 

(five years old), as bishop of Osnaburgh, was in blue and 
gold, with the insignia of the Bath. His royal highness had 
been elected Bishop of Osnaburgh on the 27th of February, 
1764 ; and having been born on the 16th of August, 1763, he 
was exactly six months and ten days old when he became 
a bishop ! He received the order of the Bath on the 30th 
of December, 1767, and was installed in Henry the Eighth's 
chapel, June 15, 1772 ; and, as principal companion of 
the Garter, was installed at Windsor on the 25th of the 
same month. 

In this year, 1769, his majesty caused a drawing-room to 
be held by the Prince of Wales ; and the novelty excited 
much attention. 



The king had an aversion to Wilkes and the No. 45. 
The Prince of Wales, in his ninth year, had been severely 
punished for some fault, and he took a laughable mode of 
revenge. Going to the king's bedroom door, before he was 
up, he kept beating on the panels, and roaring out " Wilkes 
for ever ! — No. 45 for ever !" until the king burst into laugh- 
ter and had him removed. 

The system of discipline now established was severe, and 
the prince was excluded from the society of youth of his own 
age, and subjected to a mechanical precision of habits. 
Eight hours every day were devoted to hard study at the 
desk. He rose at six, and breakfasted at eight. He and the 
Duke of York had a farm in Kew Park, which they culti- 
vated under the guidance of Mr. Arthur Young. They 
ploughed and sowed the land, reaped the com, and went 
through every process with their own hands, up to the 
making of the bread. A private purse of limited extent was 
given to the youth, and his expenditure of the money was 
strictly scrutinized, and attended with either praise or cen 
sure. 



Some idea maybe formed of George the Third's notions 
of discipline and manners, by the fact that it having been 
reported to his majesty, in 1772, that Archbishop Corn- 



372 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

(vallis had frequent convivial parties at his palace, the mo 
narch immecQately addressed to him the following- admoni- 
tory letter : 

" My GOOD Lord Primate, — I could not delay giving you 
the notification of the grief and concern with which my 
breast was affected at receiving authentic information that 
routs had made their way into your palace. At the same 
time, I must signify to you my sentiments on this subject 
which hold these levities and vam dissipations as utterly in- 
expedient, if not unlawful, to pass in a residence for many 
centuries devoted to divine studies, religious retirement, and 
the extensive exercise of charity and benevolence ; I add, 
in a place where so many of your predecessors have led their 
lives in such sanctity as has thrown lustre on the pure reli- 
gion they professed and adorned. From the dissatisfaction 
with which you must perceive I behold these improprieties, 
not to speak in harsher terms, and in still more pious prin- 
ciples, I trust you will suppress them immediately ; so that 
I may not have occasion to show any further marks of my 
displeasure, or to interpose in 'a. different manner. May God 
take your grace into his almighty protection ! I remain, my 
lord primate, your gracious friend. " G. R." 



The following paragraph appeared in the London news 
papers in the month of May, 1771, relative to a circumstance 
which excited some interest about the Court at St. James's. 
" The following are the particulars relative to the impropei 
behaviour of the person who struck his royal highness 
Prince William Henry (his present majesty). The Prince 
of Wales, the Bishop of Osnaburgh, Prince William Henry* 
&c. were at play in one of the apartments, and the head of 
one of their drums being out, the young gentlemen pre- 
vailed on the attendant to get into the drum-hoop that thejf 
might draw her about. Prince William (who is full of hu 
mour) contrived to throw her down ; when she, in her fool- 
ish resentment, flung tiim against the wainscot. The king 
was told of it, who ordered her to go to St. James's, and 
remain there till Lady Charlotte Finch came to town, as 
his majesty did not choose to interfere in such matters. 
On Lady Charlotte's arrival she examined into the particu- 



APPENDIX. 373 

lars, when another of the attendants said that the person ac- 
cused did not strike the prince. The Prince of Wales (his 

late majesty) being present, said, 'Pray Mrs. do not 

assert any such thing ; you know she did strike my bro- 
ther ; but you are both Scotch women, and will say any 
thing to protect each other.' His royal highness's answer 
occasioned much diversion." 



The late king was remarkably good-natured ; and from 
the numerous anecdotes that have transpired since his death, 
we can fully believe Colonel M'Mahon's dying character ot 
him, as " one of the kindest-hearted men alive." There 
were intervals when, in the various vexations of his per- 
plexed career, he may have given way to anger ; but they 
were few and always momentary. The slight incidents 
that follow are proofs that kindness was the natural temper- 
ament of his mind. 

" Nearly forty years ago, his late majesty, then Prince of 
Wales, was so exceedingly urgent to have 8001. at an hour 
on such a day, and in so un"sual a manner, that the gentle- 
man who furnished the supply had some curiosity to know 
for what purpose it was obtained. On inquiry, he was in- 
formed, that the moment the money arrived the prince drew 
on a pair of boots, pulled off his coat and waistcoat, slipped 
on a plain morning frock without a star, and turning his 
hair to the crown of his head, put on a slouched hat, and 
thus walked out. This intelligence rai&ed still greater cu- 
riosity, and with some trouble the gentleman discovered the 
object of the prince's mysterious visit. An officer of the 
army had just arrived from America with a wife and six 
children, in such low circumstances, that to satisfy some 
clamorous creditor he was on the point of selling his com- 
mission, to the utter ruin of his family. The prince by ac- 
cident overheard an account of the case. To prevent a 
worthy soldier suffering, he procured the money ; and that 
no mistake might happen, carried it himself. On asking at 
an obecure lodging-house in a court near Covent Garden for 
the lodger, he was shown up to his room, and there found 
the family in the utmost distress. Shocked at the sight, he 
not only presented the money, but told the officer to apply 

Ii 



374 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

to Colonel Lake, living in street, and give some ac- 
count of liimself in future ; saying which, he departed, with- 
out the family knowing to whom they were obliged." 



Some years since an artist, being at Carlton Palace, ob- 
served to the late Mr. , one of the royal establishment 

— " How I should like to see the council-table prepared for 
the council !" " Your wish shall be gratified," said his 
friend. It happened that a council was to be held that 
very day. They proceeded to the apartment : when there, 
the artist, smiling, observed, " Now, if I were to judge of 
your royal master only by what I see, I should conclude 
that he was very little-minded." " And why so ?" inquired 

Mr. . " Because I perceive, first and foremost, that 

all the chairs for the council are exactly equidistant ; se- 
condly, that there are so many sheets of foolscap, and so 
many sheets ( *" post, and a long new pen laid diagonally 
on each, and ail at measured mathematical distances ; and, 
thirdly, that the \ery fold of the green cloth" — fine broad- 
cloth, which covered the long table — " is exactly in the 
centre of the table." " You are a quiz" said the officer 
of the household. " Would I could put on the invisible 
cap," resumed the gentleman, " that I might see and hear 
what passes, when the regent is seated in that golden 
chair."* " Perhaps you might be disappointed in your ex- 
pectations ; but," added his friend, in a low voice, " if, sir, 
you could see and hear what I have seen and heard, and 
what will probably occur again after this day's council, you 
might feel Uttle disposed to relate what you had seen with 
levity." The officer of the household then took a sheet of 
paper from the table, walked to the fireside, placed his right 
arm on the marble chimney-piece, while he held the paper 
in his left hand, and looking the artist in the face, said : 
" Sir, fancy him this day, after the breaking up of the 
council, standing thus, and the recorder of London standing 
in your place, bearing the list of the miserable culprits 
doomed to death by the sentence of the law. How little 

* The council was held in the throne room ; but his royal highness, 
then regent, sat at the head of the table, in a high-backed gilt chair. 



APPENDIX. 375 

do they or the world know, that the most powerful pleader 
for a remission of their punishment is the prince ! — ^while, 
one by one, he inquires the nature of the offence in all its 
bearings, the measure of the guilt of the oifender, and whe- 
ther the law absolutely demands the life of the criminal, — - 
palliating the offence by all the arguments becoming him, 
who, as the ruler of the nation, is the Fountain of Mercy. 
Yes, sir, nearly two hours have I known the prince plead 
thus, in the presence of the minister of justice, for those 
who had no other counsellor." 



THK LATE KING AND HIS SERVANTS. 

Among almost innumerable instances of the feeling of 
cur late sovereign, may be here related one which occurred 
many years ago, while he was Prince of Wales. Being at 
Brighton, and going rather earlier than usual to visit his 
stud, he inquired of a groom, "Where is Tom Cross?* is 
he unwell ? I have missed him for some days." " Please 
your royal highness, he is gone away." " Gone away ! — 
what fori" "Please your royal highness (hesitating), I 

believe — for — Mr. can inform your roval highness." 

" I desire to know, sir, of you ; — ^what has he done ]" " I 
believe — ^your royal highness — something — not — quite cor- 
rect — something about the oats." " Where is Mr. If 

— send him to me unmediately." The prince appeared 
much disturbed at the discovery. The absent one, quite a 
youth, had been employed in the stable, and was the son 
of an old groom who had died in the prince's service. The 
officer of the stable appeared before the prince. " Where 
is Tom Cross ? — ^what has become of him ]" " I do not 
know, your royal highness." " What has he been doing V* 
" Purloining the oats, your royal highness ; and I dis- 
charged him." " What, sir, send him away without ac- 
quainting me ! — not know whither he is gone ! a fatherless 
boy driven into the world from my service with a blighted 
character ! Why, the poor fellow will be destroyed : fie, 
• ! I did not expect this from you ! Seek him out, sir, 

* TMs name ia assumed. f A. superior of the stable department 



376 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

and let me not see you until you have discovered him/ 
Tom was found, and brought before his royal master. H,« 
hung down his head, while the tears trickled from his eyes. 
After looking steadfastly at him for some moments, " Tom, 
Tom," said the prince, " what have you been doing 1 
Happy it is for your poor father that he is gone ; it would 
have broken his heart to see you in such a situation. 
I hope this is your first offence." The youth wept bitterly. 
" Ah, Tom, I am glad to see that you are penitent. Your 
father was an honest man ; I had a great regard for him : 
so I should have for you, if you were a good lad, for his 

sake. Now, if I desire Mr. to take you into the stable 

again, do you think that I may trust yoa ?' Tom wept still 
more vehemently, implored forgiveness, and promised re- 
formation. " Well, then," said the gracious prince, " you 
shall be restored. Avoid evil company : go, and recover 
your character : be diligent, be honest, and make me your 
friend : and — ^hark ye, Tom — I will take care that no one 
shall ever taunt you with what is past." 



Some years since, a gentleman, while copying a picture 
in one of the state apartments at Carlton House, overheard 
the following conversation between an elderly woman, one 
of the housemaids, then employed in cleaning a stove-grate, 
and a glazier, who was supplying a broken pane of glass : 
" Have you heard how the prince is to-day 1" said he (his 
royal highness had been confined by illness). " Much bet- 
ter," was the reply. " I suppose," said the glazier, " you 
are glad of that ;" subjoining, " though, to be sure, it canH 
concern you much." "It does concern me," replied the 
housemaid ; " for I have never been ill but his royal highness 
has concerned himself about me, and has always been 
pleased, on my coming to work, to say, ' I am glad to see 
you about again ; I hope you have been taken good care 
of; do not exert yourself too much, lest you be ill again.* 
If I did not rejoice at his royal highness's recovery, ay, and 
every one who eats his bread, we should be ungrateful 
indeed !" 



APPENDIX. 377 



PREDTCTION. 



**I remember," says the Margravine of Anspach, in her 
Life, "a singular anecdote "which was related to me by 
Mr. Wyndham (a man totally devoid of superstition), which 
had arisen from a story told me by the Prince of Wales. 
At the end of the last century Sir William Wyndham, being 
on his travels through Venice, observed accidentally, as he 
Was passing through St. Mark's Place in his cabriolet, a more 
than ordinary crowd at one comer of it. On stopping, he 
found it was a mountebank who had occasioned it, and 
who was pretending to tell fortunes, conveying his predic- 
tions to the people by means of a long, narrow tube of tin, 
which he lengthened or curtailed at pleasure, as occasion 
required. Sir William, among others, held up a piece of 
money, on which the charlatan immediately directed his 
tube to his cabriolet, and said to him, very distinctly, in 
Italian, * Signor Inglase, cavete il bi?.nco cavallo.' 

"This circumstance made a very forcible impression 
upon liim, from the recollection that some few years before, 
when very young, having been out at a stag-hunt, in re- 
turning home jfrom the sport he found several of the servants 
at his father's gate, standing round a fortune-teller, who 
either was or pretended to be both deaf and dumb, and for 
a small remuneration wrote on the bottom of a trencher, 
with a piece of chalk, answers to such questions as the 
servants put to him by the same method. As Sir William 
rode by, the man made signs to him that he was willing to 
tell him his fortune as well as the rest, — and in good-hu- 
mour he would have complied ; but as he could not recol- 
lect any particular question to ask, the man took the tren- 
cher, and, writing upon it, gave it back, with these words ■ 
Written legibly, ' Beware of a white horse.' Sir William 
smiled at the absurdity, and totally forgot the circumstance, 
till the coincidence at Venice reminded him of it. He im- 
mediately and naturally imagined that the English fortune- 
teller had made his way over to the continent, where he 
bad found his speech ; and he was now curious to know 
the truth of the circumstance. Upon inquiry, however, he 
felt assured that the fellow had never been out of Italy, nor 
understood any other language than his own. 
" Sir William Wyndham had a great share in the trans* 
Ii2 



378 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

actions of government during the last four years of Queen 
Anne^s reign, in which a design to restore the son of Jame« 
II. to the British throne, which his father had forfeited, 
was undoubtedly concerted ; and on the arrival of George I. 
many persons were punished, by being put into prison or 
sent into banishment. Among the former of those who 
had entered into this combination was Sir William Wynd- 
ham, who, in 1715, was committed as a prisoner to the 
Tower. Over the iimer gate were the arms of Great Bri- 
tain, in which there was then some alteration to be made, 
in consequence of the succession of the house of Brunswick ; 
and as Sir William's chariot was passing through, conveying 
him to his prison, the painter was at work adding the wliite 
horse, which formed the arms of the Elector of Hanover. 
It struck Sir WilHam forcibly. He immediately recollected 
the two singular predictions, and mentioned them to the 
lieutenant of the Tower, then in the chariot with him, and 
to almost every one who came to see him there during his 
confinement ; and, although probably not inclined to super- 
stition, he looked upon it as a prophecy which was fully 
accomplished. But in this he was much mistaken ; for, 
many years after, being out hunting, he had the misfortune 
to be thrown while leaping a ditch, by which accident he 
broke his neck. He rode upon a white horse. 

" The Prince of Wales, who delighted in this kind of 
stories, told me that one day, at Brighton, riding in com- 
pany with Sir John Lade, and unattended (which they fre- 
quently were), they had prolonged their ride across the 
downs farther than they had intended. An unexpected 
shower of rain coming on, they made the best of their way 
to a neighbouring house, which proved to be that of a 
miller. His royal highness dismounting quickly, Sir John 
took hold of the horse's bridle till some one should make 
his appearance. A boy came up and relieved Sir John of 
his charge. The rain soon abating, the prince, on the 
point of remounting his horse, observed that the boy who 
held the bridle had two thumbs upon his hand, and, in- 
quiring who he was, was informed by him that he was the 
miller's son. It brought immediately to his recollection 
that old prophecy of Mother Shipton, that when the prince*f 
bridle should be h^ld by a miller's son with two thumbs on 
one hand, there would be great com-nlsions in the kingdom. 



APPENDIX. 379 

The circumstance was laughable, and his royal highness 
was much amused at the singularity of it." 



PORTRAITS OF THE LATK KiNQ. 

It is well known that the queen, from the infancy of the 
Prince of Wales, was through life much attached to him. 
Soon after his birth, her majesty had a whole-length portrait 
of his royal highness modelled in wax. He was represented 
naked. This figure was half a span long, lying upon a 
crimson cushion, and it was covered by a bell-glass. Her 
majesty had it constantly on her toilette at Buckingham 
House, and there it was seen by the visiters after her ma- 
jesty's decease. The likeness was still palpable, though 
the original had outli\ ed the date of the fairy model more 
than half a century. Few years passed, it is believed, with- 
out her majesty having his portrait, in miniature, enamel, 
silhouette J modelled in marble or wax, or in some other style 
of art. 

In one of the state apartments at "Windsor, there is a 
family piece representing the queen seated with, as it would 
appear, two of the royal children ; one on the lap, a few 
months old, exceedingly fair; the other a sturdy infant, 
aged apparently about two years. Those are described as 
the Prince of Wales and Duke of York. 

Some years since, his late majesty, going round the col- 
lection, and describing the pictures to a foreigner of distinc- 
tion, stopped at this family piece. Mr. Legg, the principal 
cicerone, had just described it as usual to the party, when 
the condescendi'ng monarch observed, "You must alter your 
history, Mr. Legg." Then smiling, and addressing himself 
not only to the foreign gentleman, but to the whole party, 
he observed, " That picture was painted by the ingenious 
Mr. Allan Ramsay, son of the celebrated author of ' The 
Gentle Shepherd.' Now, Mr. Ramsay having like his father 
become celebrated too, fell into the common fault of portrait- 
painters — ^undertaking more than he could perform. He 
engaged to paint within a given time the Queen and the 
Prince of Wales, then an infant in arms, as you per- 
oseive. He completed the likeness of the mother, who migM 



380 GEORGE THE FOURTH 

have waited, but somehow neglected to finish the child until 
he had grown into the sturdy boy you see standing before 
her." So that in fact it is two portraits of the same child, 
though in that short space more dissimilar to each other than 
perhaps at any subsequent period. 



Dibdin, in his "Musical Tour," relates the following 
anecdote of the Prince of Wales : — 

" By his royal highness's appointment, I had the great 
honour to sing to his royal highness, at the house of a friend, 
twenty songs, all of which received perfect approbation. 
The prince remained two hours, even though Marchesi had, 
during the interval, made his first appearance at the King's 
Theatre. His royal highness, upon my singing the 'High- 
mettled Racer,' informed the company that he had fortu- 
nately about a fortnight before rescued a poor, old, half-blind 
race-horse from the galling shafts of a hackney post-chaise." 



George IV. must no doubt have often heard from his early 
whig associates, that every person who sets foot on British 
ground becomes free, and that it matters not, as regards the 
point of freedom, whether a man is white, black, brown, 
olive, or yellow. His majesty had all the antipathy of a 
Virginia negro-driver to blacks. A naval peer incurred 
irretrievable disgrace by an attempt to carry through the for- 
malities of presentation a wealthy half-breed from Calcutta; 
and Cramer, the musician, nearly lost his situation of leader 
of the royal band by a similar piece of imprudence. The 
story, as regards Cramer, runs thus : — The fiddling gene 
ralissimo was bent on having a black man to beat the kettle- 
drum ; but aware of his majesty's antipathy to the sable 
tribe, he was in despair of ever bemg able to accomplish his 
wishes, when he met by chance with a native Englishman 
of so dark a hue, that at a short distance he might easily be 
mistaken for an importation from the coast of Guinea. 
Cramer had the man forthwith installed in the oflace of ket- 
tle-drummer, and now came the trying scene of his introduc- 
tion to the royal presence. On the king's entering the 



APPENDIX. 381 

tousic-room, he started, and seemed much displeased ; but 
after approaching a little nearer, and applying a glass to his 
eye, he called Cramer to him. " I see, sir," said the king, 
" you wish to accustom me to a black drummer by degrees.'* 



When Prince of Wales he patronised many of the emi- 
nent actors. To Jack Johnstone he was particularly kind. 
Meeting him one day on the Steyne, his royal highness in- 
vited him to dinner ; and while Johnstone was making his 
reply, the late Mr. Lewis came near, whom he took leave to 
introduce to his royal highness. When Lewis had witn- 
drawn, some remarks were made on his talents, and John- 
stone said, " He has now a son going out to India ; a single 
word from the Prince of Wales would be the making of 
him. If your royal highness would condescend to favour 
him with a letter, it would serve him immensely." The 
prince looked at the actor for some moments, but made no 
reply. Johnstone feared he had given offence. " I beg your 
royal highness's pardon," said he, " I fear I have taken too 
great a liberty." " No, Johnstone," replied the prince, 
" that is not it ; but I am considering whether a letter from 
my brother Frederick would not be likely to serve the young 
gentleman more. A day or two afterward, Johnstone re- 
ceived, under cover from the prince, two letters — one from 
himself, and one from the Duke of York. This was not 
doing things by halves ! 

The prince allowed Kelly lOOZ. a-year ; or rather, insisted 
upon his having a/ree benefit at the Opera House annually 
for the remainder of his life, and on each of those occasions 
the king gave him lOOZ. 



In Liquorpond-etreet lived the once well-known Leader, 
the coachmaker, whom the prince patronised, and thus 
made him for a considerable period the most fashionable 
coachmaker in London ; by which means he accumulated 
a very handsome fortune. The prince, when in town, was 
frequently in the habit of going to Leader's shop, some- 
times driving himself in a phaeton and four, and sometimes 
driven by an attendant. 



382 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

When the late Lord Erskine was attorney-general to 
the Prince of Wales, he was retained by Thomas Paine to 
defend him on his trial for publishing the second part of his 
" Rights of Man ;" but it was soon intimated to him by 
high authority, that such advocacy was considered to be in- 
compatible with his official situation ; and the prince him- 
self, in the most friendly manner, acquainted him that it 
was highly displeasing to the king, and that he ought to 
endeavour to explain his conduct. This Mr. Erskine imme- 
diately did in a letter to his majesty himself, in which, after 
expressing his sincere attachment to his person, and to that 
ccnstitution which was attacked in the work to be defended, 
he took the liberty to claim, as an invaluable part of that 
very constitution, the unquestionable right of the subject to 
make his defence by any counsel of his own free choice, if 
net previously retained, or engaged by office from the crown ; 
and that there was no other way of deciding whether that 
was or was not consistent with his situation as attorney- 
general to the prince, than by referring, according to cus- 
tom, the question to the bar, which he was perfectly willing, 
and even desirous to do. In a few days afterward, Mr. 
Erskine received, through the late Admiral Payne, a most 
gracious message from the prince, expressing his deep re- 
gret in feeling himself obliged to accept Mr. Erskine's resig- 
nation, which was accordingly sent. A few years after- 
ward, however, his royal highness sent for Mr- Erskine to 
Carlton House, while he was still in bed under a severe ill- 
ness, and taking him most graciously by the hand, said to 
him, that though he was not at all qualified to judge of re- 
tainers, nor to appreciate the correctness or incorrectness 
of his conduct in the instance that had separated them, yet 
that, being convinced he had acted from the purest motives, 
he wished most publicly to manifest that opinion, and there- 
fore directed him to go immediately to Somerset House, and 
to bring with him for his signature the patent of chancellor 
to his royal highness, which he said he had always designed 
for M*/. Erskine. 



The king was particularly fond of anatomical and medical 
pursuits ; and Mr. Carpue, now a distinguished lecturer oa 
the science of anatomy in the metropolis, had the honour of 



APPENDIX. 383 

demonstrating to his majesty, when prince, the general 
structure of the human body, in which he took great inte- 
rest. His majesty prided himself upon his medical informa- 
tion, and had always near him men distinguished for their 
successful researches in the sciences of anatomy and medi- 
cine. Mr. Weiss, the ingenious instrument-maker, used 
for many years to submit to his majesty's inspection every 
new surgical instrument that came out invented by himself 
or others ; and we have heard, that in one instance he was 
indebted to his majesty for the suggestion of a very valuable 
improvement. 



ORIGINAL LETTER OF THE KING, WHEN PRINCE OF WALES, TO 
THE LATE DUTCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE. 

How little you know me, ever dearest dutchess, and how 
much you have misconceived the object of this day's dinner, 
which has succeeded beyond my most sanguine expecta- 
tions ! It has almost, if not entirely, annihilated every 
coolness that has for a short time past appeared to exist 
between the Duke of Norfolk and his old friends, and 
brought Erskine back also. Ask only the Duke of Leinster 
and Guildford what passed. I believe you never heard 
such an eulogium pronounced from the lips of man, as I 
this day have pronounced upon Fox, and so complete a 
refutation of all the absurd doctrines and foolish distinctions 
which they have grounded their late conduct upon. This 
was mpst honourably, distinctly, and zealously supported 
by Sheridan, by which they were completely driven to the 
wall, and positively pledged themselves hereafter to follow 
no other line of politics than what Fox and myself would 
hold out to them, and with a certain degree of contrition 
expressed by them, at their ever having ventured to express 
a doubt respecting either Charles or myself. Harry How- 
ard, who never has varied in his sentiments, was overjoyed, 
and said he never knew any thing so well done, or so well 
timed, and that he should to-night retire to his bed the 
happiest of men, as his mind was now at ease, which it 
had not been for some time past. In short, what fell from 
both Sheridan as well as myself was received with rapture 



384 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

by the company ; and I consider this as one of the luckiest 
and most useful days I have spent. As to particulars, I 
muet ask your patience till to-morrow, when I will relate 
every incident, with which I am confident you will be most 
completely satisfied. Pray, my ever dearest dutchess, 
whenever you bestow a thought upon me, have rather a 
better opinion of my steadiness and firmness. I really 
think, without being very romantic, I may claim this of 
you ; at the same time I am most grateful to you for your 
candour, and the affectionate warmth, if I may be allowed 
so to call it, which dictates the contents of your letter : you 
may depend upon its being seen by no one but myself. 
Depend upon my coming to you to-morrow. I am delighted 
with your goodness to me, and ever 

Most devotedly yours, 
Carlton Houses Friday night. G. P 



On the death of the late Duke of Cumberland, George 
the Fourth, then Prince of Wales, was elected Grand 
Master of the Grand Lodge of Freemasons, and in that 
character his royal highness presided at the subsequent 
anniversary dinner, consisting of the members of all the 
inaugurated lodges of masons in London. The meeting 
was held at Freemasons' Tavern, and nearly 500 persons 
were present. On this occasion the prince exhibited, in 
various speeches, powers which astonished the audience ; 
and while he expatiated upon the character and virtues 
of his recently deceased uncle and predecessor in office, 
many were in tears. This, we believe, was the only great 
public occasion in which the oratorical powers of the Prince 
of Wales were exhibited during three or four hours. Lord 
Moira occupied a place on the right hand of the prince, 
who appointed him Deputy Grand Master, which, by the 
death of the Duke of Manchester, had become vacant. 



George the Fourth was an accomphshed musician ; hi' 
majesty performed well on the violoncello, and sang wit^ 
great taste and judgment: his voice web a bass of fine 



APPENDIX. 385 

quality, mixing harmoniously with other voices in glees, &c. 
When Mazzinghi conducted the Sunday concerts which 
used to take place at the residences of persons of rank 
some thirty or forty years ago, the Prince of Wales played 
the principal bass with Crosdill. 



The late king has left a will, which, as soon as his 
majesty's decease was announced, was placed in the 
hands of the Duke of Wellington, who handed it to the 
present sovereign, and it has been opened. The indivi- 
duals named as executors are the Duke of Wellington, the 
late Lord Giiford, and Sir William Knighton. The will 
is dated some years back. 



A valuable miniature likeness of Oliver Cromwell, painted 
from life, having been accidentally found, the possessor had 
the honour of showing it to the late king, who immediately 
exclaimed, " How would Charles I. have honoured the man 
who had brought him Oliver Cromwell's head !" 



The king's service of plate is superb : he had a very 
plain set in common use ; but before his last illness, when 
the cabinet ministers held a council at Windsor, and dined 
with him, the rich service was produced, and was the object 
of great attraction. The king had provided a sumptuous 
sideboard for its display, which was made of very dark and 
beautifully polished mahogany, inlaid with gold, and lined 
with looking-glass ; but when put up, it was found entirely 
to overpower the effect of the other furniture and decora- 
tions of the apartment. The obvious course to pursue 
would have been its removal ; instead of which, however, 
the magnificently decorated arch, which the lower part of 
the sideboard supported, was cut away, and the remainder 
left for use. The apartments are spacious and well-con- 
structed; they have, however, from the nature of tho 

K k 



386 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

building, only one principal light, and there is too much 
gold panelling m them for elegance. 



So averse was the king to he seen during his rides m 
the parks at Windsor for the last two or three years, that 
outriders were always despatched, while his pony-chaise 
was preparing, to whichever of the gates he intended to 
pass, across the Frogmore road, driving from one park into 
the other ; and if anybody was seen loitering near either 
gate, the course of the ride was instantly altered, to escape 
even the passing glance of a casual observer. His majesty 
seldom drove across to the long walk from the castle, be- 
cause he was there more likely to be met by the Windsor 
people. His most private way was through a small gate 
in the park wall, opposite another small gate in the wall 
of the grounds at Frogmore, at the Datchet side. He there 
crossed the road in a moment, and had rides so arranged 
between Frogmore and Virginia-water, that he had between 
twenty and thirty miles of neatly planted avenues, from 
which the public were wholly excluded. At certain points 
of these rides, which opened towards the public thorough- 
fares of the park, there were always servants stationed on 
those occasions, to prevent the intrusion of strangers upon 
the king's privacy. 

The plantations have been so carefully nourished for 
seclusion around the royal lodge, that only the chimneys 
of the building can be now seen from the space near the 
top of the long walk. The king, while engaged in fishing, 
caused the same rigid exclusion from his grotesque building 
at Virginia-water to be enforced ; and also when visiting 
the various temples which he had erected on the grounds. 
A great deal of money was laid out on these edifices ; but 
it was only by stealth and the connivance of servants that 
they were at any time to be seen. 

His majesty was so little aware that the fatal result of 
his indisposition was near at hand, that up to a very late 
period of his sufferings he occupied himself considerably 
with the progress of some additions which he was making 
to the royal lodge. He was particularly anxious to have a 
new dining-room finished by his birth-day, on the 12th of 



APPENDIX. 387 

August, not thinking that a month before that day his re- 
mains would be gathered into their tomb. He was also up 
to the same late period occupied by the improvements in 
Windsor Castle, and used to have himself rolled through 
the apartments in a chair which was constructed for his 
majesty's use. Notwithstanding these anticipations, it is 
known that the king's health had been declining for nearly 
two years. His old sufferings from the gout had given way 
to an occasional " embarrassment of breathing" (the expres- 
sive phrase of the bulletins), and at times to great depres- 
sion of spirits. His majesty was often found apparently lost 
in abstraction, and relieved only by shedding tears. At other 
times, however, the king took a great interest in the works 
which were carrying on in the lodge and the castle of Wind- 
sor, particularly those which he intended for his private 
use, and spoke of a long enjoyment of them. 

It is said that for some time before Sir Henry Halford 
and Sir M. Tierney were last called in, his late majesty 
was under the domestic medical treatment of two gentlemen 
who were of his household. His majesty had for a long 
time evinced a great indisposition to exercise of any kind ; 
the least exertion was attended with faintness, and his ma- 
jesty's usual remedy was a glass of some liqueur. He had 
a particular kind of cherry brandy, which he thought to be 
of medical use when he felt these symptoms of debility, 
and to which he resorted up to a late period of his life. 
Until the bursting of the blood-vessel on the day before his 
death, the king did not think his case absolutely hopeless ; 
even then, the shght refreshment of sleep rallied his spirits 
a little. 

His majesty for many years had been scarcely ever free 
from some symptom which indicated the presence, more or 
less severe, of gout in the extremities ; but in January, 
during the existence of the catarrhal affection, the extremi- 
ties were entirely free from every sign of gout. At the 
latter end of February, and even in the beginning of March, 
his majesty was well enough to take his customary rides 
in an open carriage, and occasionally visited the different 
parts of the royal demesne in which his various improve- 
ments and alterations were going forward. On Monday, 
the 12th of April, he rode in the parks for the last time, and 
passed an hour in the menageriej a Dlace in which he took 



388 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

great delight. While there he complained of pain and 
faintness, and inquired of the keeper if he had any brandy 
in the house. The man, an old servant of the Duke of 
York, said he had something which he thought his majesty 
would like better than brandy. " What is that ?" said his 
majesty. " Cherry gin," was the reply ; " it was made by 
my old woman, sir." The king seemed much pleased by 
this mark of attention, and expressed a wish to taste " the 
old girl's cordial." On its being handed to his majesty, he 
appeared to relish exceedingly the (to him novel) compound, 
and finished the remainder of the bottle. 

The harassing dry cough and wheezing respiration still 
continued, notwithstanding the remedies that were em- 
ployed. It was on the 28th of the month (March) that Mr. 
Wardrop, on visiting the king, first called the attention of 
Sir W. Knighton to the existence of an alarming disease 
going on in his majesty's heart. From the examination of 
the circulating and respiratory organs, which Mr. Wardrop 
then made by means of the stethoscope, it was quite evi- 
dent that the "embarrassment" in the king's breathing 
arose from a disordered state of the heart's action, the blood 
not being propelled with its natural regularity and velocity 
through the lungs. 

The rale, or wheezing sound, was attributed to an in 
jected suffused state of the mucous membrane lining the 
air-cells, and was independent of that disturbance of the 
respiration produced by the irregularity in the action of the 
heart. The circumstance of the extremities, which had 
been so long affected by gout, being now entirely free from 
every symptom of that disease, and the well-known strongly- 
marked gouty constitution of his majesty, indicated the pre- 
cise character of the disease which existed in the cavity of 
the thorax, and led to the hope that, by an effort of nature, 
or by the aid of art, a revulsion or translation of the gout 
from the chest to the extremities might remove the more 
dangerous inflammatory affection of the vital organs. Time, 
however, has shown that this salutary termination of his 
majesty's disorder was not to be realized. Like many per- 
sons subject to gout, his majesty had occasionally, and 
taorc particularly before a paroxysm, an intermittent pulse 
Bod a corresponding irregularity of the heart's action. 



APPENDIX. 389 



ROYAL AMATEURS. 



His late majesty inherited a musical temperament on the 
side of both father and mother. George III., as is well 
known, possessed a German taste for the organ, and was, 
it is said, a good performer. His queen (who had doubtless 
profited by one of the family of the Bachs, long a music- 
master at court) was a singer, had been accompanied by 
Mozart, and favourably mentioned as a player on the harp- 
sichord in the diary of Haydn. The testimony of the old 
composer may be relied on ; it came to light among other pri- 
vate memoranda years after his death, but when every thing 
connected with Haydn had become matter of public interest, 
and his opinions upon art the property of posterity. Haydn's 
note is, " the queen played pretty well ,*" a cautious phrase, 
but one more complimentary to her acquirements than the 
loose epithets of praise which are generally dealt out upon 
Hny exhibition of royal cleverness. The patronage which 
George HI. bestowed upon the solid style of the ancient 
masters, grew out of his early intimacy and admiration of 
the works of Handel ; and the particular favour which he 
testified towards this author's compositions was in part the 
conscientious fulfilment of a promise. Our authority for 
the following anecdote is good, and the circumstance is not 
too romantic to be true. 

After one of the concerts at court, at which George HI., 
then a child, had been an auditor, Handel patted the little 
boy on the head, saying, " You will take care of my music 
when I am dead." This pathetic injunction of the com- 
poser the king, to his honour, never forgot. How it may 
be in other arts we know not ; but in music it is seldom that 
the taste changes after an individual has arrived at manhood 
in the admiration of a certain beav. ideal. This is particu- 
larly the case where people have strong feeling, with little 
science : it is knowledge alone which, in opening to us the 
possible advantages of new discoveries, renders music pro- 
gressive. Although the great revolution in music which 
had been anticipated by C. P. E. Bach, and which was car- 
ried through by Haydn and Mozart, took place during the 
reign of George HI., and although the king was visited by 
kith the latter composers, and was partly sensible of their 

Kk2 



390 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

merits, he still preferred Handel. With his late majesty 
ir.usic was less a passion than with George III., but he pos- 
sessed refinement of taste. Though a dilettante performer 
on the violoncello, for which instrument he was the pupil of 
Crosdill, he was more celebrated for his encouragement of 
clever professors, than for admiration of Ids own successes, 
or desire to enchant the lords and ladies in waiting by the 
royal tours de force. A youth, son of one of the persons 
of his household, having manifested an inclination for mu- 
sic, the king despatched him to Vienna to receive the best 
cultivation which the care of Mozart could bestow upon his 
talent ; the object of this right princely patronage was Mr. 
Attwood. He ever manifested a particular regard for Lindley 
and J. B. Cramer ; and we have heard it mentioned that one 
of the finest exhibitions of piano-forte playing was given by 
the latter at the Pavilion at Brighton a few years back. So 
well knovni among professors was the partiality of the late 
king to Lindley, that he was named as the most probable 
successor of Shield in the mastership of the royal band of 
musicians. This post was, however, otherwise disposed of. 

The first score of the opera La Clemenza di Tito knovpn 
in this country was obtained from the library at Carlton 
House, and, as a signal favour from the prince to Mrs. Bil- 
lington, was lent for her benefit. How worthy that extra- 
ordinary woman was of the distinction she soon displayed, 
in presence of the admiring orchestra and vocal corps of the 
Opera House, by sitting down to the score, playing the 
whole opera through, and singing the part of Vitellia at 
sight ! 

The prince once received a letter by the twopenny post, 
which he is said to have kept as a curiosity. It was sent 
by Griesbach, the German oboe-player, with a simplicity 
characteristic of the man, to request payment for attendance 
at some private concerts. The original mode of applica- 
tion caused much diversion to the party addressed, and pro- 
cured the money instantly. Church-music his majesty did 
not encourage so much as might have been beneficial. If 
Handel had in the preceding reign found favour to the ex- 
clusion of other masters, and consequently to the narrow- 
ing of the public taste, in the succeeding one fashion hardly 
gave him a chance. Under the withering influence of ne- 
glect in the highest quarters, and suffering too from the in- 



APPENDIX. * 891 

troduction of the modern sacred compositions of the conti ■ 
nent, seductive through the effects of Ught and shade, and 
the rich and varied employment of instnmients, Handel 
was fast sinking into neglect. The enthusiasm which Ger- 
many and France now manifest for the works of this author, 
the pubhc admiration which Beethoven expressed of him, 
and the lately published testimonies of Haydn and Mozart, 
have had their effect upon this country, and the ancient 
taste is reviving. The latest musical expense of the mo- 
narch was his private band of wmd instruments : this was 
unequalled in Europe. The performers were picked with 
the greatest care by Cramer, the master ; their allowance 
was liberal, and their united practice diligent and punctual. 
The person selected to preside in this department was one 
who not only knows the full scope and capacity of every 
instrument, but is an ahle harmonist, and competent to 
adapt a composition in its most effective manner. Not 
knowing whether the band exists or not under William IV., 
we can scarcely avoid some confusion of tenses in writing 
about it. We hope, however, his present majesty has too 
much taste to dispense with a set of performers that would 
be an ornament to any court in Europe. 



ROYAL OBSEQUIES. 

The royal mausoleum was built by George the Third, 
under Cardinal Wolsey's magnificent tomb-house, which 
reverted to the crown upon the disgrace of that magnificent 
minister. The present tenants of this gloomy mansion are 
George the Tliird and his Queen, the Princesses Charlotte 
and Amelia, and the Dukes of Kent and York, together 
with the infant Princes Octavius and Alfred. There are 
stone stands for twelve coffins in the centre of the tomb, 
which are reserved for sovereigns. The coffins of the other 
members of the royal family are deposited on shelves at each 
side. The entrance is in the cboir of St. George's chapel, 
from which a subterraneous passage leads to the tomb. 
The first coffin of the royal founder's family (that of his 
daughter Princess Amelia) was deposited here on the 4th 
of November, 1810 ; the last that of the Duke of "iork. 



393 • GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

The coffin had been exhibited to the public in a room 
belonging to the factory, which was hung round with 
black. The coffin is covered on the outside with purple 
velvet, and lined on the inside with white satin. The nails 
are placed in double rows around either side, and at the 
head and foot, and the sides are divided into three compart- 
ments by double rows of nails. A scroll frame is placed in 
each of these compartments ; and at the ends, and within 
the frame, is a handle highly burnished and gilt. The 
comer plates in the compartments have a coronet engraved 
on them, surrounded with chased palm branches, and the 
engraved letters, G. IV. R. The lid of the coffin is simi- 
larly lined and ornamented with nails, and divided into 
three compartments. In the centre is fired the plate of 
inscription. At the head are the royal arois, and at the 
foot is a shield, supported by a lion, and surrounded with a 
wreath of laurel. The plate, ornaments, handles, and nails 
are composed of metal richly gilt. 



The following is the inscription issued from the College 
of Arms, to be engraved on the silver plate which is sol- 
dered on the leaden coffin, and also on the plate which is 
to be placed on the state coffin : — 

DEPOSITUM 

SERENISSIMI POTENTISSIMI ET EXCELLENTISSIMI 

MONARCHY 

GEORGII QUART! 

DEI GRATIA BRITANNIARUM REGIS 

FIDEI DEFENSORIS 

REGIS HANOVER^ AC BRUNSVICI, ET LUNEBURGI- DVCIS 

OBIIT XXVI. DIE JUNII 

ANNO DOMINI MDCCCXXX. 

^TATIS SU^ LXVIII. 

REGNIQUE SUI XI. 

The state coffin is larger than any that are usually made, 
measuring across the shoulders three feet one inch and a 
half. The plate on which the " depositum" is engraved is 
of a size proportionate to that of the coffin ; it is nineteen 



APPENDIX. 393 

inches and a half in length, seventeen inches and a half in 
width at the top, and fourteen inches and a quarter at thai 
bottom. 



After the king's funeral, the Duke of Cumberland re- 
mained behind ; and, when the chapel was entirely cleared, 
his royal highness, attended by the deputy surveyor-general, 
and a few workmen, descended into the royal vault. He 
passed firom coffin to coffin, until he came to that which 
encloses the remains of the late Duke of York ; when, sud- 
denly turning to the deputy surveyor-general, he said, 
" Matthews, my poor brother York's coffin seems much 
more mildewed than any of its predecessors !" The velvet 
covering of the Duke of York's coffin is much discoloured ; 
while those of George III. and his Queen, the Princess 
Charlotte, the Duke of Kent, and even that of the Princess 
Amelia, remain as fresh in appearance as when first placed 
within the sepulchre. Mr. Matthews explained, that, in 
all probability, the discoloration of the velvet was the con- 
sequence of the wood of which the coffin was formed not 
having been so well seasoned as the others. His royal 
highness made no farther comment ; but, laying his hand 
on the coffin of his late majesty, and pondering on the in- 
scription for a moment or two, he ascended from the vault, 
and returned to his apartments in the Castle. 



The churches throughout the metropolis were hung with 
black cloth, on account of the death of his majesty. The 
name of " our most gracious sovereign William" Was sub- 
stituted for that of " George" in the church service. The 
latter name has been used since the accession of Georgre I. 
in 1714. 

The name of Adelaide is not new in the list of Queens 
of England. The second wife of Henry I. was Adelaide, 
a princess of Louvain. The mother of King Stephen, 
daughter of William the Conqueror, was Adela, which is 
in fact, the same name. 



394 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 



Copy of the Letter addressed to the Managers of the different 
Theatres and Vauxhall Gardens, 

" Lord Chamberlain's Office, June 26, 1830. 
" Sir, — In consequence of the death of our late most 
gracious sovereign, I am commanded by the lord chamber- 
lain to desire that the theatre under your management be 
immediately closed, and continue so till after the funeral. 
" I am, sir, your obedient servant, 

"J. B. Mash." 

At a late hour the following was issued : 

" Lord Chamberlain's Office, June 26, 1830. 
" Sir, — I am authorized by the lord chamberlain to ac- 
quaint you, that the king, taking into his beneficent consi- 
deration the very great distress which the shutting up of 
the theatres for any length of time would occasion to nu- 
merous families, his majesty has been graciously pleased 
to command that the closing of the theatre under your 
management, on accoiuit of the melancholy event of the 
demise of our late most gracious sovereign, shall be confined 
to this evening, the two days of the body lying in state, 
and the day of the funeral, of which due notice will be 
given you. 

" Your obedient servant, 

"J. B. Mash.'» 



LIVING HEIRS TO HIS LATE MAJESTY. 

Class I. — 1 . William Henry, the present king. 2. Alex 
andrina Victoria, of Kent. 3. Ernest Augustus, Duke 
of Cumberland. 4. George Fred. Alex. Ch. Ern. Aug., 
of Cumberland. 5. Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex. 
6. Adolphus Frederick, Duke of Cambridge. 7. George 
"William, of Cambridge. 8. Augustus Caroline, of Cam- 
bridge. 9. Augusta Sophia, of England. 10. Elizabeth, 
Landgr. of Hesse Homburg. 11. Mary, Dutchess of 
Gloucester. 12. Sophia, of England. 

Class IL — 13. William Frederick, Duke of Gloucestciv 



APPENDIX. 395 

1^. Sophia Matilda, of Gloucester. 15. Charles Fr. Aug. 
Wwi., Duke of Brunswick. 16. William, of Brunswick. 
17. Augustus, of Bruntiwick. 18. Frederick William, 
King of Wirtemberg. 19. Chas. Fred. Alex., Prince 
Royal of Wirtemberg. 20. Maria Freda. Chara., of Wir- 
temberg. 21. Sophia Freda. Matilda. 22. Catherine. 
23. Paul. 24. Frederic Charles. 25. Frederic Augustus. 
26. Frederica. 27. Paulina, wife of Grand Duke Michael 
of Russia. 28. Frederica Catherine, wife of Jerome Buo- 
naparte. 29. Jerome Napoleon. 30. Frederick VI., King 
of Denmark. 

After the present royal family of Denmark, come in suc- 
cession Class III. — The family of the King of the Nether- 
lands. The family of the Elector of Hesse Cassel. The 
numerous descendants of Louisa of England, Queen of 
Denmark,* grandmother of Frederick IV., and the present 
Dutchess of Holstein, and also of the dethroned King of 
Sweden (Gustavus Adolphus), of the Elector of Hesse 
Cassel, &c. ; so that the family of the last-named claim from 
Louisa of England, Queen of Denmark, as well as from her 
sister Mary, Landgravine of Hesse Cassel. 

Class IV. — The very numerous descendants of Sophia 
of England, Queen of Prussia, mother of Frederick the 
Great, &c. ; who was great-grandmother to the present 
King of Prussia, the late Dutchess of York, the present 
King and Queen of the Netherlands, &c. She was also 
grandmother to Charles XIII. of Sweden, to Princess Rad- 
zivil, to Sophia, Abbess of Quedlenberg, &c. 

* That is to say, the descendants of the Electress Sophia (Dutchess 
Dowager of Hanover, daughter of the Princess Elizabeth, Queen of Bo- 
hemia, who was daughter of James the First), whom the act of settle- 
inent (I3th William III. 1701) declared *' next in succession to the crown 
of England, in the ProtestarU lint " 



S96 GEORGE THE FOTTRTH. 

NOTICES OF THEIR PRESENT MAJESTIES. 

HIS MAJESTY KING WILLIAM THE FOURTH. 

William the Fourth, third son of King George the Third, 
was bom August the 21st, 1765, and was baptized by the 
name of William Henry. At an early age he was destined 
by his royal father for the naval service of his country. At 
fourteen he was entered as midshipman on board the Prince 
George, of ninety-eight guns, recently built, and called after 
the Prince of Wales, his late majesty, commanded by Ad- 
miral Digby, In this ship he served in the engagement 
between the Engli^ fleet, under the command of Admiral 
Rodney, and the Spanish fleet, commanded by Admiral Doia 
Juan de Langara, when the Enghsh gained a complete vic- 
tory, the Spaniards, however, fighting very bravely. The 
AdJtniral in his despatches mentioned, that " he had called a 
captured Spanish man-of-war the Prince William, in con- 
sequence of her having the honour to be taken in presence 
of his royal highness !" 

WTiile serving in the Prince George, his royal highness 
was also present at the capture of a French man-of-war and 
three smaller vessels. The following instance of his royal 
highness's humanity will do him more honour with reflecting 
minds than the mere accident of birth can ever bestow : — 
It is described by a midshipman in a letter to his family, 
dated " Port Royal Harbour, April, 1783. The last time 
Lord Hood's fleet was here, a court-martial was held on 
Mr. Benjamin Lee, midshipman, for disrespect to a superior 
ofl[icer, at which Lord Hood sat as president. The deter- 
mination of the court was fatal to the prisoner, and he was 
condemned to death. Deeply affected as the whole body 
of midshipmen were at the dreadful sentence, they knew 
not how to obtain a mitigation of it, since Mr. Lee was 
ordered for execution ; while they had not time to make an 
appeal to the Admiralty, and despaired of a petition to Ad- 
miral Rowley. However, his royal highness generously 
stepped forth, drew up a petition, to which he was the first 
to set his name, and solicited the rest of the midshipmen in 
port to follow his example. He then hiirrself carried the 



APPENDIX. 397 

petition to Admiral Rowley, and, in the most pressing and 
argent manner, begged the life of an unhappy brother, in 
which he succeeded, and Mr. Lee is reprieved. We all 
acknowledge our warmest and grateful thanks to our hu- 
mane, our brave, and worthy prince, who has so nobly 
exerted himself in preserving the life of his brother sailor.'* 
The war ceased in 1782, before the prince's service as a 
midshipman was completed. He, however, was determined 
to quahfy himself for command, and continued in active 
service; and, in 1783, visited Cape rran9ois and the Ha- 
vana. 

Another opportunity was here afforded him of exercising 
His humanity for the deliverance of the unfortunate. Some 
of his countrymen, having broken the fidelity they had pro- 
mised to the Spanish government, were in danger of suffer- 
ing under a sentence of death. His royal highness inter- 
ceded with effect — they were pardoned and liberated. The 
following letter, written by his royal highness to Don Gal- 
vez, the governor of Louisiana, does honour to his talents 
and the goodness of his heart : 

" Sir, — I want words to express to your excellency my 
just sense of your polite letter, of the delicate manner in 
which you caused it to be delivered, and your generous 
conduct towards the unfortunate in your power. Their 
pardon, which you have been pleased to grant on my ac- 
count, is the most agreeable present you could have offered 
me, and is strongly characteristic of the bravery and gal- 
lantry of the Spanish nation. This instance increases, if 
possible, my opinion of your excellency's humanity, which 
has appeared on so many occasions in the course of the 
late war. Admiral Rowley is to despatch a vessel to Louis- 
iana for the prisoners. I am convinced they will ever 
think of your excellency's clemency with gratitude ; and I 
have sent a copy of your letter to the king, my father, who 
will be fiilly sensible of your excellency's attention to me. 
I request my compliments to Madame Galvez, and that you 
will be assured, that actions so noble as those of your ex- 
cellency will ever be remembered by yours sincerely, 

« William P." 

His royal highness, having served his full time as mid- 
shipman, was promoted in due course to the rank of lieu- 
tenant and captain, and commanded for a considerable time 

LI 



398 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

the Pegasus frigate, and in 1790 was appointed rear-admi- 
ral of the blue. On the 20th of May, 1789, his royal high- 
ness was created Duke of Clarence and St. Andrew's, and 
Earl of Munster ; and on the breaking out of the war with 
France, took a prominent part in the debates in the House 
of Lords in support of the war. 

As his royal brother, the Duke of York, was among the 
first that left our shores to face the enemy on the continent, 
some surprise was excited that the Duke of Clarence was 
not given a command in the navy. The cause is still un- 
known to the public ; probably it remained a secret in the 
breast of liis royal father. That he was from the com- 
mencement of the war desirous of service has never been 
doubted. He made repeated and earnest applications to 
the king to be allowed to hoist his flag, and reUeve Lord 
Collingwood, then in a declining state of health, in the 
command of the Mediterranean fleet. About the same pe- 
riod, a letter, addressed by the duke to Commodore Owen, 
appeared in the public papers, which thus describes his so- 
licitude to share the dangers of war and the glories of vic- 
tory : — " When I shall have the honour to hoist my flag I 
cannot be certain ; but I am very much inclined to think, 
that eventually I shall have the honour and happiness of 
commanding those fine fellows whom I saw in the spring, 
in the Dowtis and at Portsmouth. My short stay at Ad- 
miral Campbell's had impressed me with very favourable 
ideas of the improved state of the navy ; but my residence 
at Portsmouth has afforded me ample opportunity of exa- 
mining, and consequently of having a perfect judgment of 
the high and correct discipline now established in the king's 
service." 

" Nothing is wanting, sir," said Nelson to Prince Wil- 
liam Henry, in 1787, in one of his epistles, "to make you 
the darling of the English nation, but truth. Sorry I am 
to say, much to the contrary has been dispersed. More 
able friends than myself your royal highness may easily 
fijid, and of more consequence in the state ; but one 
more attached and affectionate is not so easily met with. 
Princes seldom, very seldom find a disinterested person to 
communicate to. I do not pretend to be that person ; but 
of this be assured, by a man who, I trust, never did a dis- 
honourable act, that I am interested only that your royal 



APPENDIX. 399 

highness should be the greatest and best man this country 
ever produced." 

When Nelson married Mrs. Nisbett in March, 1787, in 
the West Indies, the Duke of Clarence, then Prince Wil- 
liam Henry, who had gone out to the West Indies the pre- 
ceding winter, was present by his own desire to give away 
the bride. 

On the 11th of July, 1818, his majesty married the Prin- 
cess Adelaide Louisa Theresa (born August 13, 1792). His 
majesty next received his appointment to the office of lord 
high admiral, an office long thought to be too great to be 
intrusted to any individual, and accordingly executed by 
commissioners since the death of Prince George of Den- 
mark, husband of Queen Anne. 

On the appointment of Mr. Canning to the dignity of 
prime minister, several of his colleagues had resigned, most 
of them on the alleged ground of his being a supporter of 
Catholic emancipation, which had been opposed by Lord 
Liverpool. Lord Melville, the first lord of the Admiralty, 
though a supporter of the Catholic claims, thought fit to re- 
sign also. The object of the resignations evidently was to 
drive Mr. Canning from the helm ; but to enable him to 
counteract that object, the resignation of the first lord of the 
Admiralty was most opportune, though certainly the con- 
sequence was unforeseen by the party. Mr. C aiming 
boldly revived the office of lord high admiral in the person 
of the next heir to the crown, his present majesty ; and by 
that prompt and unlooked-for exercise of the royal preroga- 
tive, at once confounded the seceders, and greatly strength- 
ened his administration. 

The manner in which his royal highness executed the du- 
ties during the short period he filled the office will never 
be forgotten by the navy. He visited every naval depot ; 
conversed on friendly terms, not only with every com- 
mander, but with every officer ; and made promotions with- 
out regard to any thing but merit and service, wholly disre- 
garding parliamentary influence. The lord high admiral 
was accessible to every naval officer, without even the ce- 
lemony of full dress ; and if every wish could not be grati- 
fied, at least every one was satisfied that his royal highness 
was anxious to render him service. The lord high admira^ 
also exercised a princely hospitaUty. With such qualities 



400 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

it was impossible that he should not be beloved. Mr. Can- 
ning had, however, ceased to rule or to live. The Duke of 
Wellington became his successor, and it was soon per- 
ceived that he was desirous to have Lord Melville restored 
to the office. The popularity his royal highness acquired 
during his performance of the duties of cnief of the navy 
may fairly be considered a presage of the manner in which 
he may be expected to discharge the higher duties of sove- 
reign of a great and loyal people. 



The annual parliamentary allowance to his present ma- 
jesty, as heir presumptive, amounted to 32,500Z., being 
17,500Z. per annum less than the income of Prince Leopold, 
who receives 50,000Z. 

The Duke of Cumberland has 25,000Z. per annum ; the 
Duke of Cambridge 27,000Z. ; the Duke of Sussex 21,000Z. ; 
the Princesses Sophia and Augusta 13,000Z. each ; the 
Dutchess of Kent 12,000Z. ; the Duke of Gloucester, 14,000Z. 

Independently of the income enjoyed by his present ma- 
jesty, the queen was in the receipt of 6,000Z. per annum ; 
which was settled upon her on her marriage in 1818. 



THE QUEEN; 

Her majesty, the queen consort of these realms, is tne 
daughter of George Frederick Charles, Duke of Saxe-Co- 
burg Meinengen, by Louisa Elenora, a daughter of Chris- 
tian Alber Lewis, prince of Hohenloe-Lat genburg. Her 
majesty was bom on the 13th of August, 1792, and was 
baptized by the name of Adelaide Louisa Theresa Caroline 
Amelia. In 1803 her majesty lost her excellent father, who 
died at the early age of 42 ; and with her only brother, the 
present Duke of Saxe Meinengen, and her sister, Ida, 
Dutchess of Saxe Weimar Eisenach, was left under the 
guardianship of her mother, the dutchess ; who, by her 
husband's last will, was left regent of the dutchy and guar- 
dian of his children. Under this able and amiable woman 
the children were educated in great retirement at Meinen- 



APPENDIX. 401 

gen, the capital of the small principality, and with a care 
and attention to their morals and improvement in every 
branch of polite learning that does the highest credit to her 
virtues and character. This excellent princess is still alive, 
and last year spent several weeks with her daughter in 
JEngland. From earliest childhood the queen was remark- 
able for her sedate and rather reserved habits. Her whole 
time was devoted to her studies ; and though naturally of 
a cheerful and lively disposition among her more intimate 
associates, she took little or no pleasure in the gayeties or 
frivolities of fashion ; and even when arrived at more ma- 
ture years, she showed an utter detestation for that laxity 
of morals and contempt for religious feeling which had 
sprung out of the revolution in France, and had found their 
way into almost every petty court in Germany. 
I The court of Meinengen happily did not attract much of 
the notice of the emperor of the French. It was' not 
thought necessary either to attempt its corruption by his 
profligate emissaries, or to crush its existence by the arm 
of power ; consequently the widowed regent was left in 
undisturbed possession of her authority, and permitted to 
educate her children and regulate her dutchy according to 
her own views and wishes, while almost every other state in 
Germany became a focus of atheism and immorality in con- 
sequence of that laxity of principle which France had in- 
troduced among them. The little court at Meinengen was 
therefore remarkable for its strict morality, and steady sup- 
port of the Protestant faith ; and its princesses became 
celebrated for their amiable and estimable conduct. Their 
chief dehght was in establishing and superintending schools 
for the education of the lower classes of the community, and 
in procuring and providing food and raiment for the feeble 
and destitute in the city and suburbs of the ducal residence. 
The Princess Adelaide was the life of every institution 
which had for its object the well-being of her fellow-crea- 
tures. 

Our late Queen Charlotte had long observed this family, 
which, flourishing like an oasis in the great desert of cor- 
rupted Germany, had attracted much of her regard ; and 
when her foresight judged it prudent to urge her third son, 
the Duke of Clarence, to enter into the wedded state, she 
strongly pressed upon his attention the only remaining 

L 1 3 



402 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

daughter of the house of Meinengen. The youngest sister, 
Ida, had already been raarried to her cousin Bernard, the se- 
cond son of the Grand Duke of Saxe Weimar. Accord- 
ingly, a regular demand was made of the princess's hand in 
marriage, and a favourable answer returned. As it was'im- 
possible for his royal highness to proceed to Germany, the 
princess, with her mother, was invited over to England, and 
on the 11th of July, 1818, the prince and princess were 
married at Kew, in the presence of the queen and other 
members of the royal family ; and at the same time the 
marriage of the Duke and Dutchess of Kent, which had 
previously taken place in Germany, was performed accord- 
ing to the rites of the church of England. 

After the ceremony, the Duke and Dutchess of Clarence 
spent a few days in retirement at St. James's Palace, and 
then proceeded, with a numerous suite, to Hanover. In the 
capital of that kingdom they spent the winter of 1818 and 
spring of 1819. The most happy anticipations were formed 
of her giving birth to an heir to the crown of England. 
In the month of March, however, her royal highness caught 
a severe cold, which ended in a violent pleuritic attack, and, 
in consequence of the treatment necessary to preserve her 
valuable life, premature labour was induced, and in the se- 
venth month her royal highness was delivered of a princess. 
It was christened on the day of its birth by the name of 
Elizabeth Adelaide, but expired soon afterward, and was in- 
terred in the royal vault at Hanover, where lie the remains 
of the great Elector, Ernest Augustus, and his grandson, 
George II. 

The dutchess's recovery was slow, and a change of air 
being thought requisite, she proceeded, as soon as she was 
able to travel, to her natal soil, visiting (»ottingen and Hesse 
Philipsthall, on the way to Meinengen. The joy of the 
good people of Saxony on again beholding their princess 
knew no bounds : they knew how dangerously ill she had 
been, how almost miraculous had been her recovery ; and 
from the moment she entered the precincts of the dutchy, 
she was met and welcomed by tiie vassals of her brother, 
and carried in triumph, for a distance of nearly thirty miles, 
to the capital, when fete succeeded fete, and all the world 
kept holyday for nearly a month. The royal duke, too, 
by his kind and condescending manners, and devoted atten- 



APPENDIX. 40^ 

tion to his fair spouse, soon won the hearts of the unso- 
phisticated natives, and became as one of their native 
princes. 

After a residence of six weeks in the castle, the court 
moved to Lubenstein, a residence retired, and of singular 
beauty, where there are celebrated mineral springs, and 
where, in the course of the smnmer, the dutchess recovered 
her health perfectly. The duke, whose heart was always 
in England, determined on returning to Bushy ; and the 
dutchess, who had been charmed with the beauties of that 
retirement during her short stay in this country, strongly 
urged his doing so, maintaining that they might live as 
economically at Bushy Park as at any other place in the 
world. Towards the end of October, 1819, the royal pair 
left Meinengen, on their return to England. The fatigue 
of so long a journey was too much for her delicate frame, 
and at Dunkirk she suiFered a miscarriage. This again 
affected her health ; and a residence on the seacoast being 
reckoned advisable. Lord Liverpool offered the duke the use 
of Dover Castle ; and on landing from the Royal Sovereign 
yacht, the Duke and Dutchess of Clarence took up their 
residence in that ancient building, where they remained 
nearly six weeks. 

The dutchess being now perfectly recovered, they re- 
moved to St. James's (Bushy House being under repairs), 
and spent the winter of that year in London. Again there 
seemed a fair prospect of her giving birth to a child at the 
full time. Considerably before the natural period, however, 
her royal highness was delivered of a fine healthy princess. 
The child, nevertheless, grew, and increased in strength 
daily, to the great joy of its illustrious parents, and of the 
nation at large. By special desire of the late king she was 
christened Elizabeth — a name dear to Englishmen ; but 
when about three months old, she was seized with a fatal 
illness which carried her off in a few hours. 



PROCLAMATION OF HIS MAJESTY. 

Monday, June 28, being appointed for the proclamation 
of his Majesty, William IV., the heralds and other persons 



404 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

whose duty it was to officiate on the occasion, assembled 
at an early hour at St. James's Palace. 

In the course of the morning the court of the royal resi- 
dence became crowded with carriages of the nobility and 
ministers of state, and the adjoining streets were filled with 
spectators. 

The weather was extremely favourable, and a prodigious 
mult-.tude thronged the streets through which the caval- 
cade was expected to pass. It is seldom that such an im- 
mense mass of people is seen collected together. 

Shortly before ten o'clock his Majesty arrived at the pa- 
lace from Bushy Park. The king was attired in deep 
mourning, and wore a blue sash over his left shoulder. His 
Majesty was received by the Dukes of Cumberland, Sussex, 
and Gloucester, Prince Leopold, the Duke of Welling- 
ton, &c. 

Every avenue and situation in the neighbourhood of the 
palace was crowded with individuals desirous of witnessing 
the approaching ceremony. Seldom or never has so vast 
a concourse been congregated in the Park and inunediat 
vicinity of St. James's. 

Precisely at ten o'clock the Park and Tower guns having 
been fired by signal, Sir George Nayler, Garter King-at- 
Arms, read the Proclamation, aimouncing the accession of 
his Majesty. 

During this ceremony, his Majesty, surrounded by his 
illustrious relatives, and aU the great officers of state, pre- 
sented himself to the view of his subjects at the palace win- 
dow. As soon as he was recognised, the air was rent with 
acclamations. The king appeared greatly affected by this 
spontaneous and unanimous burst of enthusiastic loyalty 
and attachment, and acknowledged the attentions of his 
people by repeatedly bowing. Those who were fortunate 
enough to secure a position near the palace observed that 
the kmg was affected even to tears. 

The gates of the palace having been thrown open, the 
procession moved forward, the Life Guards, who accompa- 
nied it, brandishing their swords, and the ladies in the balco- 
nies and windows of the houses contiguous waving their 
handkerchiefs, amid a tempest of cheers from the multitude, 
who took off their hats and shouted " Long live King Wil- 
liam IV. I" 



APPENDIX. 405 

At ten o'clock the procession began, amid the roar of the 
Park guns, and the scarcely less noisy acclamations of the 
multitude. 

On its arrival at Charing-cross, the procession moved in 
the foUovd^ing order : — 

Mr. Lee, High Constable of Westminster, with a number 

of Officers to clear the way. 

Two Horse Guards. 

A single ditto. 

The Farrier of the Horse Guards. 

Four Pioneers with their axes. 

The Beadles of St. James's and St. Martin's Parishes in their 

full dresses, and with their staves of office. 

A posse of New Police Constables. 

The Band of Horse Guards in their State uniforms. 

Eight Marshals on foot. 

The Knight Marshal and his Men. 

The Household Troop. 

State Band, Kettle-drums, and Trumpets. 

Pursuivants on horseback. 

Heralds. 

The King-at-arms, supported by Sergeants with their maces. 

Troop of Horse Guards. 

It is difficult to conceive anything more imposing than the 
appearance of Charing-cross and its immediate vicinity on 
the approach of the procession. The streets were lined 
with spectators in thousands, coaches and vehicles of every 
description thronged the way, and the houses from basement 
to roof were crowded with persons anxious to witness and 
offer the tribute of their cheer to the passing pageant. The 
ringing of the church bells, the discharge of ordnance, 
and the shouts of the multitude, added greatly to the ex- 
citement of the occasion. From the opera house to Cha- 
ring-cross every position that afforded the chance of a view 
of the cavalcade was occupied by clusters of human beings ; 
and the whole scene presented an extremely animated ap- 
pearance, the gay dresses of the females not having been as 
yet superseded by the sombre garb of mourning. 

The procession having halted, the following proclamation 
was read : — 



406 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

" Whereas, it hath pleased Ahnighty God to call to his 
mercy our late Sovereign Lord King George the Fourth, 
of blessed memory, by whose decease the imperial crown 
of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is solely 
and rightfully come to the high and mighty Prince William, 
Duke of Clarence ; we, therefore, the lords spiritual and 
temporal of this realm, being here assisted with those of 
his late majesty's privy council, with numbers of other 
principal gentlemen of quality, with the lord mayor, alder- 
men, and citizens of London, do now hereby, with one 
voice and consent of tongue and heart, publish and pro- 
claim that the high and mighty Prince William, Duke of 
Clarence, is now, by the death of the late sovereign, of 
happy memory, become our only la,wful and rightful liege 
Lord William the Fourth, by the grace of God, King of 
Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith (and so 
forth). To whom we acknowledge all faith and constant 
obedience, with all humble and hearty affection, beseeching 
God, by whom kings and queens do reign, to bless the royal 
prince, WUliam the Fourth, with long and happy years to 
reign over us. 

" Given, &c. • God save the King !" 

At the conclusion, the air was rent by cries of " Long 
live King Wiliiam!" and hats and handkerchiefs were 
Waved in a manner the most loyal and enthusiastic. 

The procession then moved slowly along the Strand to- 
wards Temple-bar, the gates of which were closed accord- 
ing to custom. On a herald demanding admission in the 
name of King William IV., the, gates were opened by the 
city marshal, who conducted the herald where the lord 
mayor, attended by the sheriffs, and other municipal au- 
thorities, awaited in their carriages the approach of the ca- 
valcade. At the end of Chancery-lane the proclamation 
was again repeated, and the dwellers east of Temple-bar 
afforded satisfactory evidence that their lungs and loyalty 
were as strong as those of the inhabitants of the court-end 
of the metropolis. 

At Wood-street, Cheapside, the proclamation was also 
read, and again, at the Royal Exchange, under circumstances 
precisely similar to those already described. The last pro- 
clamation took place at Aldgate. At the conclusion of 



APPENDIX. 407 

each proclamation, " God save the King !" was played by 
the state band, and the assemblage displayed the utmost 
enthusiasm. ^ 

Throughout the whole of the line of road, the windows 
and tops of the houses were filled with spectators : every 
spot that commanded a bird's-eye view of the procession 
was crowded, and the streets presented an immense mass of 
hving loyalty. The procession was splendid without being 
gorgeous or extravagant. The assemblage attracted by it 
was immense, the Strand, from Charing-cross to Temple-bar, 
presenting the appearance of a sea of heads ; and we may 
say, that few public ceremonies within the memory of the 
present generation, have been received with more distin- 
guished marks of enthusiasm and mterest. 



Mrs. Chapone, who was niece of Dr. Thomas, Bishop 
of Winchester, formerly preceptor to George III., and used 
to spend much of her time at her uncle's residence at Farn- 
ham Castle, relates the following anecdote of the young 
Duke of Clarence : — " I was pleased with all the princes, 
but particularly with Prince William, who is little of his 
age, but so sensible and engaging that he won the bishop's 
heart ; to whom he particularly attached himself, and would 
stay with him while all the rest ran about the house. His 
conversation was surprisingly manly and clever for his age ; 
yet with the young Bullers he was quite the boy ; and said 
to John Buller, by way of encouraging him to talk, ' Come, 
we are both boys, you know.' All of them showed affec- 
tionate respect to the bishop." 



u 

DOMESTIC HABITS OF KING WILLIAM IV. 

There are few more regular or temperate men in their 
habits than the present king. He rises early, sometimes at 
six o'clock, and after having written for some time, takes 
breakfast. His Majesty then hears a report read to him of 
the various claims on his benevolence, and sometimes visits 
personally the objects of his bounty who reside in the 



408 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

neighbourhood of his residence. At dinner he seldom eats 
of any made dish, but restricts himself generally to one 
dish of plain boiled or roasted meat, drinking only sherry, 
and that in moderation — never exceeding a pint. During 
the day, when not engaged in business, he amuses himself 
in cheerful conversation with men of all parties, and retires 
to bed early. His Majesty is constitutionally subject to 
asthma; but with such habits we must hope that he will 
live to a good old age. 



It is a curious fact, but one not more strange ihan true, 
that his present majesty is at one and the same time King 
Wilham the First, Second, Third, and Fourth ! The fol- 
lowing explanation will reconcile this apparent contradic- 
tion : — ^As King of Hanover he is William the First ; that 
country giving only the title of elector to its rulers previously 
to George the Third. As King of Ireland, William the 
Second ; that kingdom was not added to the British crown 
until the reign of Henry the Second, and consequently 
William the Conqueror and William Rufus were not sove- 
reigns of Ireland ; therefore, as there were no native kings 
of that name, William the Third of England was the First 
of Ireland, and our present monarch is, of course, William 
the Second. As King of Scotland, William the Tliird ; 
the only monarch of that name previously to James the 
First (who united the two kingdoms) being the celebrated 
Wilham the Lion. And as King of England, William the 
Fourth. 



THE NEW VERSION OF " GOD SAVE THE KING," 
BY ME. ARNOLD. 

God save our noble king ! 
William the Fourth we sing • 

God save the king ! 
Send him victorious, 
Happy and glorious, 
Long to reign over us ! 

God save the king ! 



APPENDIX. 409 

O Lord our God, arise, 
Guard him from enemies, 

Or make them fall ; 
May peace, wifh plenty erown'd. 
Throughout his realms abound ; 
So be his name renown'd ! 

God save us all ! 

Or should some foreign band 
Dare to this favour'd land 

Discord to bring, 
May our brave William's name, '' 

Proud in the lists of fame, 
Bring them to scorn and shams 

God save the king ! 

Thy choicest gifts in store 
On William deign, to pour, 

Joy round him fling ; 
May he defend our laws, 
And ever give us cause 
To sing with heart and voice, 

God save the king ! 



PRIVATE HABITS, CHARACTER, AND AGE OF THE AEIGNINO 

SOVEREIGNS. 

Charles X. of France, was the oldest sovereign in Europe. 
He is seventy-three years of age, tall in person, and very hale. 

The Pope, Pius VIII., is sixty-eight, about the same age 
as his late majesty, and in tolerable vigour. The church is 
usually considered favourable to longevity. 

Bemadotte, king of Sweden, is sixty-six, and has recently 
had a severe illness, but is a strong and healthy man. 

William IV. of England, our sovereign, is sixty-five. 
He is at present in good health, and does not appear to be 
more than fifty. His temperate habits and practice of early 
rising are well known. He loves exercise, travel, and so- 
ciety. 

M m 



410 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 

Felix, king of Sardinia, is of the same age as our monarch, 
and enjoys good health. 

Frederick VI. of Denmark, sixty-two years old, is a very 
healthy man. 

Frederick William III., king of Prussia, in his sixtieth 
year, possesses a good share of health, and bids fair to hve 
to an old age. 

The king of the Netherlands, William I., is fifty-eight ; 
he has the appearance of a weather-beaten soldier, as he is ; 
and, although subject to chronic complaints, is robust. 

Louis Philippe the First, king of the French, born in 
17V3, a man of intelligence and amiable character ; elected 
by the Chamber of Deputies, on the abdication of Charles 
the Tenth, August, 1830. 

Francis, emperor of Austria, is fifty-two, and healthy. His 
affabihty and condescension in listening to the complaints 
of the meanest of his subj ects, and redressing their grievances, 
have rendered him popular. 

Francis, king of Naples, is fifty-two, and gouty. His 
character is the reverse of that of his namesake of Austria. 

Mahmoud II., sultan of Turkey, is forty-six, and pos- 
sessed of great vigour of body and mind. The Turks, how- 
ever, grow old prematurely, and Mahmoud may be therefore 
reckoned as sixty years old at the least. His countenance 
and his eye are particularly striking and impressive, and he 
is naturally a very superior man. 

Ferdinand VII. of Spain, is forty-five years old, and has 
long been a prey to disease. He has the gout constantly. 

Louis, king of Bavaria, is in his forty -fifth year : he has 
suffered from indulgence, and has but lately recovered from 
a long illness. His merits as a sovereign and as a man of 
letters are acknowledged. He passed many years in study, 
and his mind is of an enlarged and liberal cast. The pub- 
lication of a volume of poems has recently obtained him fame 
as an author, in addition to that derived from the wisdom 
of his government. 

Nicholas I., emperor of Russia,, is thirty-four, tall, hand- 
some, and accomplished, hardy and active, and accustomed 
to laborious exertion. A few months since he had a very 
dangerous illness, from which he is now recovered. He ia 
considered as a very ambitious monarch, and the enlargement 
of territory appears to be his ruling passion. 



APPENDIX. 411 

The youngest and only female sovereign is Donna Ma- 
ria da Gloria, the legitimate queen of Portugal (Don Miguel 
not having been yet recognised), v^'ho is in her thirteenth 
year. She promises to be beautiful, but her health is de- 
licate, and she is so lame as to be obliged to use crutches. 
She is now at Rio Janeiro, with her father, the emperor 
of Brazil. 



THE END. 



NOTES 

BY THE AMERICAN PUBLISHERS. 



Note I.— Page 30. 

" America's bold step." — No doubt the Declaration of Independence 
appeared like a " bold step" to those who had thought to annihilate the 
colonies with a look, or terrify them into submission by proud menaces 
and empty boastings. In the language of an enlightened writer, " it was 
a fortunate circumstance for the American colonies, that the parliament 
of Great Britain received its impressions of their character from the por- 
traits drawn of them by Generals Grant, Burgoyne, and other exquisite 
painters of the house, by whose representations the Americans appeared 
too contemptible for the formation of any serious plan of military opera- 
tions. Five regiments were thought an ample force to drive the Ameri- 
cans from Massachusetts to Georgia ! But the God of battles leans not 
to the side of the boaster." 

Note 11.— Page 33. 

" Tke ignorance of generals." — It may be some relief to the wounded 
pride of English historians to attribute their national disasters to tlw> 
incapacity of officers, as they seem determined to accede nothing to the 
skill, intelligence, and prowess of their opponents ; and, least of all, to 
the justice of their opponents' cause. This is illiberal ; but being an 
illiberality to which Americans are much accustomed from this quarter, 
it is only calculated to excite a smile. With respect to the British gene- 
rals who were sent across the Atlantic to coerce the American colonies 
into obedience, it is not only the height of injustice, but also of ingrati- 
tude. All that the ablest officers could have done, under the same cir- 
cumstances, they did. But the sword of truth and justice was drawn 
against them, and who can successfully contend with Heaven 1 Why 
pronounce them ignorant? What Enghshman, Carleton excepted, was 
there, at this period, better informed in the science of war, than those 
alluded to ? But, like the rest of their countrymen — like the self-con- 
ceited ministry themselves, they knew little or nothing of America, as 
to her physical and moral resources. If the charge of ignorance be due 
any where, it is to North and his coadjutors that it should be attributed. 
It was their ignorance and folly that dismembered the British empire, 
perhaps much sooner than it would otherwise have happened. It is true 
that Sir Henry Clinton was deficient in energy and foresight; and had Sir 
Guy Carleton or Lord Cornwallis filled his station as commander-in- 
chief, there is no doubt that America would have met with more difficul- 
ties in her struggle for national existence. But the final result must have 
been the same. America might have been overrun and ievastated ; but 
she never could have been conquered and enslaved. 



NOTES. 413 

Note III.— Page 39. 

" France wresting America from England." — If France wrested Ame- 
rica from England.then the United States '' are, and of right ought to he," 
French colonies. But such was not the fact. America wrested herself 
from England, in 1776, by her Declaration of Independence, which she 
asserted and maintained alone, sustaining the unequal conflict single- 
handed for nearly three years, as the treaty with France was not exe- 
cuted until 1778, and the war actually conunenced in April, 1775. 

Note lY.— Page 273. 

" TTie oppression was retracted." — How and when was the oppression 
retracted] and what were the colonies offered? It is true that the 
stamp act was repealed ; hut its repeal was accompanied by a declara- 
tory act still more offensive, inasmuch as it asserted " the power and 
right of Great Britain to bind the colonies in all cases whatever." Locke 
says, that " no man has a right to that which another has the right to 
take from him." 

Note Y.— Pages 79, 234, 274, 300, and 341, 

'\A/ortunate result for England." — The most appropriate comment 
which can be made on this and similar passages has already been done 
to our hands in the well-known and oft-quoted fable of the " Fox and the 
Grapes." Otherwise, the prodigal waste of human lives and public 
treasure on the part of Great Britain may be compared to 

-Ocean into tempest toss'd, 



To waft a feather, or to drown a fly ! 

Note Yl.~Page 340. 

** A IJoar of frigates.^' — If the late contest between the President, 
and Great Britain was merely " a war of frigates," as the author has 
been pleased to term it, he ought to have had the candour to inform his 
readers which party gained the victory. He does indeed admit that 
"America took some of the British cruisers," which happened to be 
" ill-manned and ill-provided ;" but this mode of expression is too indefi- 
nite to give satisfaction to either party. 

In this " war of frigates," America lost two only, viz. the United States 
and the Chesapeake. The former was captured by a British squadron, 
the latter by the Shannon, a frigate of superior force. In order to balance 
the account, let us now cast up the items on the opposite page of the leger. 

" August 13, 1812, the United States' frigate Essex, Captain Porter, cap- 
tured the British sloop of war Alert, in eight minutes, without the loss 
of a man. Six days after the foregoing, the United States' frigate Consti- 
tution, Capt. Hull, captured the British frigate Guerriere in thirty min- 
utes. October 18th, the United States' sloop of war Wasp, of 18 guns, 
Capt. Jones, captured the British sloop of war Frolic, of 22 guns, in forty- 
three minutes. On the 25th of the same month, the American frigate 
United States, Com. Decatur, captured the British frigate Macedonian, 
after an obstinate action, and brought her into the port of New- York. 
December 29th, the United States' frigate Constitution, Capt. Bainbridge 



414 NOTES. 

captured and btrmed the British frigate Java, of equal force. February 
24th, 1813, the United States' sloop of war Hornet, of 16 guns, Capt, Law- 
rence, captured the British brig Peacock, of 18 guns, in fifteen minutes. 
September 5th, tlie United States' brig Enterprise of *14 guns, Capt. Bur- 
rows, captured the British brig of war Boxer, of 18 guns, in forty min- 
utes. Five days after the foregoing, the whole British squadron on Lake 
Erie surreudered to one of inferior force, commanded by Com. Perry. 
September 16th, the American privateer schooner Saratoga, of ten guns, 
captured tV^ British brig of war Morgiaua, of 18 guns. April 29th, 1814, 
the United States' sloop of war Peacock, of .20 guns, Capt. Warrington, 
captured t»^ British brig Epervier, of 18 guns, in forty-two minutes. 
June 28th, the United States' sloop of war Wasp, Capt. Blakely, captured, 
in nineteen minutes, the British sloop of war Reindeer. September 11th, 
the whole British squadron on Lake Champlain surrendered to one of in- 
ferior forct?, under the command of Commodore Macdonough ; and a 
powerful British army was at the same time repulsed at Plattsburg by a 
body of unJisriplined militia, under General M'Comb. February 20th, 
1815, the 13 lii^ed States' frigate Constitution, Capt. Stewart, captured the 
British frigate Cyane, and sloop of war Levant, which together mounted 
fifty-four guns. March 23d, the United States' sloop of war Hornet cap- 
tured and sunk the British brig Penguin. 

The above is a brief catalogue of the most important nautical events 
of the late war ; and in almost every instance the disparity of force was 
in favour of the British. To recapitulate the minor successes of the 
United States' public and private armed vessels would swell this note to 
a history. 

Efpre we have a catalogue of sixteen American victories, — over Jive 
frigates, five brigs of war, four sloops of war, and two whole squadrons 
on the Lakes. 

Note VII.— Pa^e 341. 

" Attack on New-Orleans-" — Mr. Croly has either never read the his- 
tory of the origin of this important expedition or else his memory must 
be treacherous. The British ministers had set their hearts upon the suc- 
cess of this " demonstration," as they called it ; and in order, as they 
thought, to prevent the possibility of a failure, they selected the hardy 
veterans who had covered themselves with laurels in the fields of Spain, 
under Wellington. No pains, no expense was spared to have the forces 
suitably equipped and amply provided at all points. The whole was 
committed to the direction of a well-tried leader, of approved courage, 
skill, and experience. The occupation of New-Orleans, the very key to 
all the western States, was not only a favourite object with the ministry, 
but a popular measure with the nation ; and had they succeeded, some 
pretext would doubtless have been found to annul the treaty of Ghent. 



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